The Assassin (2015)

The Assassin (2015)
Chinese Title: 聶隱娘
Translation: Nie Yinniang

Starring: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Zhou Yun, Nikki Hsieh Hsin-Ying, Sheu Fang-Yi, Ethan Juan Ching-Tien, Komuro Tetsuya, Xu Fan, Zuo Xiaoqing, Tsumabuki Satoshi
Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Action Director: Liu Mingzhe

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of the biggest names in Taiwanese cinema...or was one of the biggest names. I suppose his legacy still stands, but he recently retired due to Alzheimer's Disease (not unlike Bruce Willis and dementia). That said, he, along with Edward Yang, was one of the main figures associated with the Taiwanese New Wave movement. He was not extremely prolific, but was probably moreso than, say, Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong's premier arthouse director. He was quite active in the 1980s, but by the 90s, was averaging a movie every 2-3 years. The Assassin ended up being his final film before retirement.

The film is based on an old martial arts tale--8th century to be exact--by Pei Xing. During the latter days of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 A.D.), there is your usual civil unrest, with some of the outer provinces distancing themselves evermore further from the Court. One of said provinces is Weibo (comprised of what today are the Hanban and Hebei states), which is currently ruled by Tian Jian (r. 796-812 -- yes, a real-life person, played by Chang Chen of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Grand Master). Tian Jian is the son of the previous Lord, or Military Governor, Tian Xu. Tian Jian was the son of a concubine, but was raised by Xu's main wife, a princess from the court. We never meet Tian Jian's parents, but they are nonetheless integral to the story.

Our story revolves around Nie Jinniang (Shu Qi, of Shanghai Fortress and The Transporter), the daughter of Commander Nie Feng (Ni Dahong, of Curse of the Golden Flower and A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop). Nie Feng is Tian Jian's uncle, which makes Jinniang the governor's cousin and, at some point, his betrothed. That stopped being a thing after a series of incidents that resulted in Jinniang being whisked away by a Taoist nun (Sheu Fangyi) for a "private education." What that ultimately meant was that Jinniang was going to be trained in the martial arts for the purpose of being an assassin for the Court. After a few "test" missions--including one she fails on account of not wanting to take a life in front of a child--Jinniang is given the mission to assassinate Tian Jian.

Jinniang returns home under the pretext of having completed her studies, and she is well received by her mother, grandmother, and even Tian Jian's wife (Zhou Yun, of Bodyguards and Assassins and Warriors of Heaven and Earth). It does not take long for Jinniang to reveal herself as an assassin, although one has to wonder if she really is cut out for this sort of work. The answer is "ultimately" no. The Assassin is a 108-minute film about an assassin who is given a job, decides not to do it, and then decides that she wants to do something else instead.

There are other things going on in the film, such as strife between Tian Jian's wife and Huji, his favorite concubine (Nikki Hsieh, of Tai Chi 0 and Tai Chi Hero). Tian Jian has problems with his own brother over what course of action to take regarding the neighboring provinces that would ingratiate (or not) the Court. There appears to be some sort of plot by the Court to kill different members of Tian family. That results in a prolonged sequence where Jinniang takes a break from her mission to protect the caravan taking a member of the Tian family to a new post from assassins.

The Assassin is definitely a minimalist film. The main plot is minimal. The dialog is minimal--Shu Qi only has a few lines in the entire movie. The action sequences are few. Exposition comes in fits and spurts from the characters, although nothing is explained quite enough to give us all the historical context we need, or the character background we're curious about. There is a lot we the viewer are expected to the meet the filmmakers halfway on.

So, why watch this? Mainly because of the visuals. The entire film is like a series of Romantic landscape paintings. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Mark Lee (Director of Photography -- Tiger Cage II; Wing Chun; Millenium Mambo), and Yao Hung-I (Cinematographer - Reflections and Hometown Boy) transform the film into this great palate of beautiful Chinese landscapes, much like you would see in a museum. Almost every scene could be freeze-framed and transformed into a Romantic painting, like Albert Bierstadt's "Yosemite Valley" series of paintings, or the works of Henri-Joseph Harpignies and Giuseppe De Nittis. Like paintings where the humans are dwarfed by the grandiosity of the nature. Even one of the fight scenes is filmed like that. The more intimate scenes between the characters are filmed in a way that, if paused, could make an excellent subject for a 19th-century Orientalist painting. To sum it up: The Assassin works as a moving gallery of Romantic-era paintings.

What it does not work as, however, is as a film for action and fight choreography aficionados. There are five or six fight sequences, each of which lasting anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds, give or take a couple of seconds. The action director is Liu Mingzhe, whose work as Assistant Martial Arts Director on films like Reign of Assassins and A Battle of Wits suggest that he was a protégé of sorts with Stephen Tung Wai. The fight sequences are portrayed the way most authors--excepting Scott Blasingame--would write them in prose: just a few moves and then back to the narrative. Where Mr. Blasingame will take a 10-minute fight scene from an imaginary film and convert the entire thing into prose, the fights here are like the ones described in Matthew Boroson's The Girl With Ghost Eyes.

The Assassin is not a film for everyone, but it is not a bad film. It makes for a fascinating comparison with Zhang Yimou's wuxia films, what with their Expressionistic use of color symbolism and Rococo levels of opulence. Contrast with the more Romantic ideals of art that Hou Hsiao-Hsien uses in his visuals here. Both filmmakers can be accused of being too pretentious, although action fans will definitely get more out of Zhang Yimou's works than The Assassin. But fans of general cinema should make an effort to watch this film, in any case.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)
Chinese Title: 九層妖塔
Translation: Nine-Story Demon Tower

Starring: Mark Chao, Yao Chen, Jin Chen, Li Feng, Tiffany Tang, Rhydian Vaughan, Wu Jun
Director: Lu Chuan
Action Director: Chen Jia-Fu

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is one of those movies where the DVD box cover (and promotional poster) is a lot more exciting than the actual film. You have a cover with a bunch of attractive young people holding AK-47’s, plus a bald guy (that reminds me of a young Gai Chun Hwa) armed with a sword, with a kaiju-sized dragon looming over them in the background. Now *that* looks like an appealing fantasy adventure film. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we get in the end.

The movie begins with a montage of important archaeological discoveries in China, including the discovery of a tomb in which the body inside is magically preserved, even after thousands of years. That particular find becomes the impetus for the creation of Bureau 749, the sort of outfit that Hellboy or Abe Sapien might work for. You know, when things go bump in the Mainland, they bump back? Their current investigation is in the Kunlun mountains, where soldiers are helping the scientists to excavate a cave in one of the mountains. This scene is particularly bizarre in an “only in the PRC” way, where we see young, attractive nurses singing patriotic songs to exhausted laborers in an attempt to keep them working. All that is interrupted by an “explosion” that takes several lives.

In the wake of the disaster, a team of volunteers is put together to investigate the cause of the disaster. Among the volunteers are our hero, Hu Bayi (Mark Chao, Young Detective Dee); Yang Ping, a young nurse (Yao Chen, Journey to the West: Demon Chapter); Yang Lin (Wang Qing Xiang, The Grandmaster and Red Cliff), the head scientist of Bureau 749; and Hu Bayi’s commanding officer (Hu Jun, of The Warring States). They head back into the cavern where the explosion had occurred and discover a new shaft, which leads to a great abyss. Carved into the walls of the abyss above them are statues of various gods, which makes for some neat imagery. Descending into the abyss, our heroes find an ice cavern, which leads to another exit from the mountain, into a snowy valley within the range.

The team come across the footprints of Something Humongous, but before they can find out what it is, they are beset by a horde of “fire bats,” which cause whomever they touch to become engulfed in blue flames until they are reduced to ashes. The Something Humongous turns out to be a dragon, which causes an avalanche to kill several more volunteers. Our heroes, while fleeing the avalanche, jump into another ice cavern, where the rest of the Expendable Meat die. By the end, the only survivors are the ones I mentioned by name.

They find a huge pagoda inside another cave, which Yang Lin identifies as the Demon Pagoda. In addition to housing some sort of demon, it also holds the secrets to the mythical “Ghostly Tribe,” the remnants of an alien race that once ruled the Earth before being defeated by Prince Yi thousands of years ago. Only a descendant of Prince Yi can enter the Pagoda, and lo and behold! Hu Bayi just happens to be a descendant. As they are opening the Pagoda, Hu’s commanding officer interrupts them, leading to a series of disasters that result in the officer’s death, the disappearance of the Yang family, and Hu almost getting burned to death. And this marks the end of the first act.

The second act is set three years later, where Hu Bayi has been released by duty. We learn that Bureau 749 is trying to recruit him (presumably), he ends up in the hands of Mr. Wang (Jerry Li Chen, of Saving General Yang and Aftershock). Mr. Wang manages a very special public library which, according to him, is full of the rarest manuscripts and tomes in China. Hu starts receiving correspondence in the form of books and articles by the late(?) Dr. Yang, where he learns about the Ghostly Tribe. Three years after that, we learn that Mr. Wang is the Guardian of the Tomb (of Prince Yi) and that Hu was infected with the essence of the Ghostly Tribe after he almost got incinerated by the fire bats. The Ghostly Tribe need him to open the Pagoda, and if that means sending demon-troll-werewolves into Xinjiang to ferret him out, that's what they'll do. Oh, and Yang Ping is back, now looking like a low-rent Shu Qi.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is a generally unsatisfying adventure film in the vein of Indiana Jones, mixing fantasy and science fiction (probably because overt supernatural elements would be censored by Mainland officials). There is too much going on and the backstory of the titular Ghostly Tribe is a bit too convoluted to really make sense or become compelling. The love story between Hu Bayi and Yang Ping is a little more effective, but Hu spends much of the movie being ineffectual and only becomes more proactive in the final third.

Moreover, much of cast isn’t onscreen enough for us to care about them. Almost everybody we meet, even briefly, in the first act is dead by the end of the first half hour. And then we meet a *new* expedition team in the last act, but we also don’t spend enough time with them to really care about their plight, so the script is basically telling us to care “because these people are young and attractive,” and that’s obviously not enough. Compounding that is the fact that several important characters, as in those who provide us with most of the exposition during the second act, disappear once the final expedition is under way, which constitutes bad writing by any metric. Having a second info dump after the climax drags out the denouement more than it should, too.

The technical side of the film is hit-or-miss. There is *a lot* of mediocre 90s-level CGI on display, as is wont to happen in these big budget Mainland films. We have avalanches and sandstorms—I half expected Arnold Vosloo’s face to appear in the sand during the latter sequence.  There are lots of floating objects that might’ve looked interesting in 3D, put just look fake and cheesy in regular HD. There is some beautiful photography--you cannot go wrong with Chinese mountain ranges and deserts. I also liked the sense of wonder and whimsy when the characters are exploring the caves in the first act. Too many "adventure" films have become excuses for big action set-pieces, but slack off in the adventure department.

The monsters fare the best. We have the aforementioned dragon that shows up in the first act, and then the final act is a running battle through a devastated town between our heroes and an army of giant werewolves. Those creatures looks a lot better onscreen than some of the other digital effects, so I’ll give them that. Too bad the script fails to explain what they actually are supposed to be in relation to the Ghostly Tribe. Some characters refer to them as demons, so I think they are the original creatures that came to Earth, some of which assumed human form, intermarried with our species, and became the Ghostly Tribe. But I'm not sure. They look pretty cool on screen, though.

The film has a credited “martial arts director”, Chen Jia-Fu, whose other major credit is Ameera, a horrid post-modern take on the Girls n’ Guns genre. But back to this movie: there are no actual martial arts to speak of. Even when shadow demons invade the royal library where Hu is working in the second act, and Hu’s boss pulls out a traditional sword, we don’t actually see any martial arts. Boring! The climax consists mainly of people fighting werewolf-troll monsters with assault rifles and RPGs, which is fun…but where’s the actual martial arts, people?

A follow-up to this movie, Bureau 748, was supposed to be released in China in 2019. Then it got pushed back to 2022, which is the current year at its HKMDB entry. Douban states that it's slated for release in 2026, but another article I read states that production finished this year (2024). Sadly, the plot synopsis I read suggests that this story will not be continued, instead focusing on the exploits of the bureau in the near-future. This saddens me, as Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe ends with a major plot thread—the disappearance of Dr. Yang Lin—unresolved, despite that being the reason for the entire third act in the first place! It also leaves the fate of Yang Ping ambiguous, which is also rather infuriating—she had a major role in the first and last acts, but we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen to her, if anything at all.

As it stands, Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is mainly a big disappointment. The script needed a few edits, the CGI needed to be more consistent, and we needed some actual wushu on display. If you want a Chinese version of Indiana Jones, stick with the Operation Condor, some of those early Wisely movies, and Dr. Wei and the Scripture with No Words. This one tries, but doesn't quite make it.

Review All Years, Part II: 2015

 Back in August of 2022, I did my first "Review All Years" marathon. The focus was on 1992. Sadly, I did not create a specific page for that. That will change now. During the month of August (of 2024), I will once again try to fill in the blanks of years not covered at the site yet.

So, this year we will cover 2015. 

What happened that year in film? The top five films worldwide were: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens; Jurassic World; Furious 7; Avengers: Age of Ultron; and Minions. Action fans were blown away by Mad Max: Fury Road. All the prestigious awards would go to The Revenant, including Leonardo di Caprio's first Oscar. Robert Eggers's career got off to a promising start with the slow-burn horror film The VVitch. Meanwhile, Jeremy Saulnier got punk culture right with his thriller The Green Room. 

...but we're here for martial arts and Asian action.

What can we expect?

Hmm...let's see: Taiwanese arthouse, Korean period pieces, Mainland Chinese Fantasy, one of Jackie Chan's last decent films, belated sequels, and Scott Adkins (a double feature if I have time).

Movies covered:

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe
The Assassin
Close Range
Rattlesnake Kung Fu 
Wolf Warrior
Transporter Refueled, The 
Empire of Lust
Beyond Redemption 
Ip Man 3



(warning: posters below do not represent what I will review this month)