Shanghai

An all-star Asian cast struggles to support this limp wartime thriller

Shanghai

(C) 2009 TWC Asian Film Fund, LLC. All rights reserved.

Director: Mikael Håfström
Starring: John Cusack, Gong Li, Ken Watanabe
Time Out rating:

The eponymous Paris of the Orient is depicted as a cauldron of simmering wartime tensions and film noir cliches in Mikael Håfström's Shanghai, which provides a good example of what we might call the Memoirs of a Geisha conundrum. Lavish sets and a cast of big-name Asian actors aren't enough to compensate for narrative limpness, in an international production that looks unlikely to recoup its estimated US$50 million budget.

John Cusack is the stand-in private dick, an American spy posing as a Nazi-sympathetic journalist who arrives in Shanghai in 1941, only to discover that his colleague and friend has been murdered after having an affair with a Japanese hooker (Rinko Kikuchi, barely even a cameo). He's soon off hobnobbing with the Germans, where he meets Triad boss Anthony Lan-Ting (Chow Yun-Fat) and his wife Anna (Li Gong), as well as Japanese intelligence officer Tanaka (Ken Watanabe).

This being noir territory, the whole thing quickly descends into a mire of murky loyalties, double crosses and illicit romance, all played out in the shadow of the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, yet Håfström struggles to muster more than a dramatic whimper from the material. The thin characterization doesn't help, and for all the glossy production values, there's also little of the eye for detail that made Ang Lee's Shanghai-set Lust, Caution so absorbing. What we're left with is a nice-looking but only fitfully interesting period piece, which in its desire to please all audiences will probably end up pleasing very few.

Shanghai opens nationwide on August 20



By James Hadfield
Please note: All information is correct at the time of writing but is subject to change without notice.

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