Shanghai

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