1/5 stars
Partnering with her best friend Kim (Lee Hong-chi), a suspended police officer with a serious drinking problem, Chen reopens the grisly murder case, in which a beautiful young artist (Bao Shangen) was raped and stabbed in a frenzied attack at her home.
Last Suspect is the latest in an enthusiastic wave of mid-tier offerings emerging from mainland China that are set in unnamed Chinese-speaking hellholes across Southeast Asia teeming with corruption and unchecked criminality.
Zhang Yimou’s latest film, Under the Light, also set its story of rampant criminal activity among officials and the super-rich in a deliberately non-specific locale.
With five credited writers, Last Suspect unravels as a breathless, vaguely coherent barrage of twists and turns that draws in and spits out characters with feverish disregard for anyone attempting to follow along.
Wang Ziyi’s scarf-sporting mystery man quickly rises to the top of Chen’s suspect list, while Kara Wai Ying-hung, as the victim’s mother, vows to see her killer brought to justice, whoever they are revealed to be.
The script spews some half-baked philosophising about the sacred bond between mothers and daughters, but there is little on screen that supports the theory.
Instead, this lazily penned potboiler stumbles its way through a parade of procedural clichés with a blatant disregard for logic, legal standards or even plausible human behaviour.
Before making her directorial debut with 2015’s romantic fantasy Suddenly Seventeen, Zhang cut her teeth co-editing her father’s sweeping period epics Under the Hawthorn Tree and Coming Home. They also shared credit on last year’s Korean war drama Sniper.
Unfortunately, it appears that little of Zhang senior’s mastery of the craft has rubbed off on his daughter. While Last Suspect admittedly delivers a polished and pacy package in line with current – albeit questionable – market trends, it remains too rambling, ridiculous and wretchedly reductive to let anyone involved off the hook.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
