3/5 stars
In the nine years since his last feature film, Hong Kong director Wong Ching-po has lost none of his affection for visually stylish crime thrillers championing losers and outcasts existing on the fringes of society.
The result is an energetic, unwieldy and ultimately somewhat baffling genre film likely to perplex audiences as readily as it entertains.
Set in Taiwan, the film stars Ethan Ruan Ching-tien as Chen Kui-lin, also known as The Kuilin Kid, a notorious hitman responsible for assassinating a high-ranking Taichung gang boss.
We first meet him at the funeral for the aforementioned gangster, where he brazenly guns down another senior mobster in front of a hall full of underworld mourners. Kui-lin is pursued by cop Chen Hui (Lee Lee-zen), who loses an eye in their scuffle.
Kui-lin escapes and, four years later, learns he has terminal stage four lung cancer. He determines to turn himself in, but upon discovering that he ranks only third on Taiwan’s Most Wanted list, the arrogant hoodlum sets off to take out his rivals for the crown of Taiwan’s most notorious criminal.
From here, Wong’s film has something of a broken-back structure, unfolding in two very distinct and tonally different parts.
The slick swagger of the film’s first half has the undeniable whiff of polished Korean thrillers like Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life, as Kui-lin zeroes in on “Hongkie” (Ben Yuen Fu-wah), a vicious gangster operating out of a hair salon.
This also sees him cross paths with Hsiao-mei (Gingle Wang Ching), a young woman being coerced into a relationship with the much older criminal.
The film’s second half feels closer in tone to the eccentric works of Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, as Kui-lin tracks down public enemy number one, “Bullhead” (Chen Yi-wen), a mass murderer who has reinvented himself as the spiritual leader of a remote island community.
Kui-lin must infiltrate the close-knit cult and surrender his advantage if he is to accomplish his profoundly questionable mission.
For all its aesthetic flamboyance and Ruan’s undeniable charisma, the character of Kui-lin raises a plethora of unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions – not least, why is he doing this?
Other characters, particularly Hsiao-mei and Chen Hui, are left frustratingly underdeveloped, as Wong asks his audience simply to strap in and become increasingly complicit in Kui-lin’s escalating maelstrom of mayhem.
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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.
