Yang Zi Jiang te yi hao

Since I am a fan of spy & secret agent movies, I heard about this one and found the DVD rather inexpensively online. The American title for this was "Secret Agent Chungking 001" and it looked like it might be good. I was expecting a fast moving, taut and full of shooting and gadgets spy movie along the lines of the "Key Of Keys" Japanese spy movies with lots of shootouts, double crosses, fancy gadgets and sexy women. What I got was completely the antithesis of a "secret agent" movie.

The film starts out with the assassination of a Japanese general, and you come to find out that this film takes place during World War II in a small village with some freedom fighters who are trying to overthrow their Japanese overlords. This film is very slow, and there's very little action in the film. There's even a moment that could have had some serious martial arts action, but the actors did not seem to be trained in it and just kicked and punched at each other randomly with no rhyme or reason. It's more of an anti-Japanese propaganda film than a "secret agent" film. The DVD also has English subtitles burned into the film, which is very distracting when the white subtitles are projected against a white or light background. Another infuriating thing about the subtitles is that the are only on the screen for a split second, so sometimes it's very difficult to make out the translation of the dialogue. The letterbox format is also very tight, and there's no way to adjust the zoom without cutting off some of the dialogue.

As far as the "gadgets", there is a trapdoor, a hidden wall, and an alarm panel that almost looks ahead of its time for the 1940's. The acting is fair to melodramatic at times, and it's really more of a human interest drama than a spy film, even though one of the "agents" calls himself "Chungking 007".

All in all, it's definitely a pass to buy, and not even worth a look on YouTube.