Fridae

There are many reasons to consider John Woo a leading Asian director. Some would point to his long career in Hong Kong film, becoming known for directing noir and crime films that defined these genres in Asian cinema. Some might say it's the celebration of brotherhood and honour even amongst killers, thieves, and mafia grunts in his films.

Clearly for Danny Pang, whom I suspect grew up watching every other John Woo title that did not receive a Criterion Collection release, Woo is the seminal director who makes crime films that never make an ounce of sense but make a fun film experience. The ballistic ballets, guns blazing pas de deux, and operatic orgies in his crime and noir films clearly take place in a universe where the fabric of reality and laws of physics don't quite apply. And Face/Off, his best film to date, takes place in a universe where the rules of logic are different from ours.

Fairy Tale Killer is a gory mystery thriller that pays tribute to this nonsensical yet highly entertaining quality of John Woo's action films. The protagonist is a cop played by Lau Ching Wan, who has made a career on TVB playing emotionally distant, socially inept but brilliant cops with EQ levels so subzero, they're almost idiot savants. In the midst of a crumbling marriage and family life, he investigates a rash of serial killings perpetuated by a pair of educationally subnormal, drooling, lisping, autistic adults who being educationally subnormal, drooling, lisping, and autistic, are obviously idiot savants. The mastermind (if you can call her that), is an artistic idiot savant whose surreal drawings of fairy tales are taken as orders for her partner in crime, an engineering idiot savant, to devise highly imaginative and elaborate deaths for their victims. And being a father to a difficult autistic child, Lau's cop character obviously draws on the child's idiot savant qualities to solve the crime and hunt down the duo!

I know. It doesn't make any sense at all and yet the more the anti-logic builds on itself, the more entertaining it gets — and that's the charm of Fairy Tale Killer.