Fridae

Surely some variant of the above saying must have been said by every mad scientist and evil genius in the history of pulp fiction. Maybe since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. In City Under Siege, that line belongs to villain Dachu (Collin Chou), who has been transformed into a hulking, fanged behemoth by the film’s end. That line can also well describe the thwarted ambitions and overweening hubris of the filmmaking team behind City Under Siege, who have absolutely no idea what has made the likes Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner craft such stories and characters of lasting appeal.

Billed egregiously as “China’s first mutant film” in the trailers as though it were something to be proud of, City Under Siege is Hongkong’s newest entry in the superhero genre. Our hero is Sunny (Aaron Kwok playing a character half his age), a young circus clown who reputedly comes from a martial arts dynasty that specializes in knife-throwing. Unfortunately such skill was denied him when his parents died and his training was incomplete. While on a tour in Malaysia with his circus mates who look down on him, the troupe stumbles upon a cache of WW2 Japanese gold...contaminated Japanese gold carrying a powerful toxin that the Japanese had originally intended to create a race of mutant warriors with. In the ensuing scuffle Sunny is left for dead when his circus mates betray him, stumbles onto a fishing vessel and is thrown overboard on the way back to Hong Kong, but he still heads back to Hong Kong wearing...a fatsuit. A-ha! I thought, so this is a Hong Kong remake of Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor!

Still, I have no idea why he comes back to Hongkong looking like the average Walmart shopper in Middle America as a result of his newfound superpowers, until he lies down on his bed and all the water seeps out from him. Ah-hah! I thought, he’s Spongebob Squarepants on steroids! So I trust BP should have hired him to clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil gusher? Maybe that’s how he’ll save the...oh never mind. It soon becomes apparent that director and writer Benny Chan has never heard of something called a “character Bible”, that’s you find at Marvel, DC, Image and all the comics houses worth their salt. A character Bible tells you the profile of each character and their powers, what they can do, what they cannot do. It tells you their backgrounds, it tells you what has shaped their personalities. Without a character Bible, all superhero comics will end up like...this movie.

Yes, as you can guess, all the other ee-vul circus performers now also have superpowers, and are using them on a wild crime spree. What superpowers each one has exactly is never made clear. It is just known that they vary from scene to scene. These powers include such things as superhuman strength, the ability to emanating high-frequency sonic waves that can smash glass and cause explosions to Carrie-style psychic rage to growing claws and developing fangs and turning green and lobbing projectile weapons with superhuman accuracy and...still, the evil mutants can be fought to a standstill by two mainland Chinese martial artists (Zhang Jingchu and Wu Jing) who make a living capturing mutants with... accupuncture and anaesthetic injections! Before long though, you stop caring about the frenetic action sequences as the film just turns into a silly, confused mess.

A well-made, silly, confused mess is what this movie is. Obviously Benny Chan and his team thought it would be a cinch to make a good superhero movie in the Hollywood vein with a Hong Kong sensibility, and trading in macho superheroics for Asian melodramatics. The answer, as this movie shows, is that it’s not a cinch at all. And like all supervillains, Benny Chan pays for his hubris. His final product is incoherent, indecisive of what it wants to be, both intellectually and emotionally unengaging, and unleashed on an unsuspecting world. I suggest Benny turn to the Bible for salvation – the character Bible.