Fridae

The Chinese folk hero Judge Dee (Di Renjie) has been for the longest time one of the few Chinese folk heroes known to large audiences in the West, especially due to a series of novels written about him by the Dutch diplomat and writer Robert Van Gulik. In fact, he has been televised twice according to the Imdb. Once played by an English actor called Michael Goodliffe in a British “Yellowface” TV series, and by Khigh Dheigh (who played Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-O) in an American telefilm, Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders. Van Gulik made Dee a sort of Chinese Sherlock Holmes, a man distinguished by masterful powers of deduction and reasoning. Historically, Dee was known chiefly as a statesman who enjoyed the favor of the notoriously suspicious Empress Wu.

With all this in mind, it’s about time Hong Kong made a solid feature film about him too. And in Detective Dee, Tsui Hark gives us a film that’s more than what this reviewer expected, but somehow still less than what this reviewer wanted. It’s an exercise in the sort of feverish historical fantasy that was Tsui Hark’s specialty all the way into the mid-90s. Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes meets his Oriental match in a film that’s just as fast paced, over the top and loaded with high adventure.

Somewhat disappointing, because Tsui’s vastly underrated Seven Swords was one of the best wuxias to hit the screen in the 2000s. Eschewing his love of fantasy and aiming for a kind of gritty hyper-realism, Seven Swords took what he experimented with on a small scale in The Blade and made it into an epic poem. Its practical effects and eye popping stunts made it a film to savor.

Detective Dee however, does not show a continuation with this trend of gritty, hyper-real wuxia. Again, Tsui Hark marshals all his brain cells to create instead the sort of historical fever dreams he once excelled, now popularized by the likes of Zack Snyder’s 300. In Tsui’s new vision, a Bodhissattva statue the height of a modern skyscraper towers above Empress Wu’s Imperial Palace. Chang’an, always known as an inland city and conduit on the Silk Road, instead contains a vast, bustling port filled with towering 19th century clippers and even a small Nestorian church, deer talk and fight, ninja gangs wield killer puppets, and the ruins of a former Imperial City devolve into a Chinese version of the goblin market from Hellboy 2: the Golden Army.

The story? Empress Wu (Carina Lau) gets her former defector Dee Renjie (Andy Lau) out of jail in order to have him solve a case in which people working on the Bodhisattva statue to be completed on the date of her coronation seem to have spontaneously combusted. For a woman whose path to power has been paved with the corpses of her enemies, the scenario offers no shortage of suspects. Dee is helped by Shangguan Jinger, the Empress’ henchwoman/protege (Li Bingbing), and a hot tempered albino agent named Pei. While Tsui makes gestures towards essays on the nature of Kingship, Power and Legitimacy, these are but lightly touched upon unlike his concise, brilliant examinations of the nature of heroism in Seven Swords. Detective Dee, for all its claims to be a whodunnit, is a movie designed to appeal to the senses rather than the brain as it hurtles from one intricately designed setpiece to another. It’s too bad that current Chinese special effects, while vastly improved from yesteryear, are still not well-designed enough to reach the level of seamlessness needed to bring Tsui Hark’s vision to credible life. Many shots of CGI are too inept to be believable and not artistic enough to be hyper-real. The effects of the film are best when they are most organic, such as when Detective Dee unleashes his customized iron rod weapon with its weird sonic resonance device.

There is no denying Tsui’s near-faultless sense of pacing, timing and editing when it comes to filmmaking, but his virtuosic command of cinematic language finds itself in charge a movie the likes of which we’ve all seen too much of from Tsui. His usual attempts at mixing science fiction and fantasy elements into wuxia, his loose rambles about the prices and obligations of power and kingship and freedom, his love of deliberately untied loose ends, his sense of black humor, his intricately-plotted yet weightless storylines, are old and well-worn territory for him. In Detective Dee he brings them all back in excess with the latest special effects he can muster. This is a movie suffering from an excess of his strengths, and shows scant if few attempts to improve upon his weaknesses.