Five years after his martial arts flick Seven Swords (七劍) hit movie theaters, Tsui Hark (徐克) returns to kung fu territory with Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (通天神探狄仁傑), which boasts a stellar cast including Andy Lau (劉德華), Carina Lau (劉嘉玲) and Li Bingbing (李冰冰).
Enhanced by CGI, the highly anticipated film is a period martial arts flick meets whodunit that at times is almost overwhelmed by its visual sumptuousness and special effects.
Set in 690, on the eve of the coronation of empress Wu Zeitan (Carina Lau), China’s first and only female ruler, the story opens inside an enormous, hollow Buddha statue, over 200m tall, that is being erected in front of the imperial court to celebrate the coronation.
Photos courtesy of Huayi Brothers Media
When a chief engineer gives a foreign ambassador a tour inside the statue, the former suddenly bursts into flames and perishes.
Soon a court official riding to the palace to report his findings on the incident suffers the same fate.
Rumors of an ancient curse circulate and the empress follows the advice of the court sage to pardon and recall Di Renjie (Any Lau), a former imperial judge sentenced to hard labor eight years previously for criticizing her.
Photos courtesy of Huayi Brothers Media
Reinstated as a judge, Di sets out to investigate the two deaths with the help of two uneasy allies: marital arts expert and Wu’s protegee Jinger (Li), and hotheaded judicial officer Pei Donglai, played by China’s Deng Chao (鄧超).
The movie progresses at a cracking pace as the trio ventures into strange places like the Phantom Market, an underground city inhabited by ghostly characters, and the Monastery of the Infinite, where the Imperial Chaplain resides.
The mystery is solved bit by bit. Dee dismisses supernatural explanations and blames the deaths on an elaborate scheme to overthrow the empress.
Tsui has a predilection for throwing fantasy and wuxia (武俠) elements together in his films, such as Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain (新蜀山劍俠, 1983) and The Legend of Zu (蜀山傳, 2001).
In Detective Dee, magic and mystery are vividly conveyed with imaginative sets like the nightmarish subterranean city, or through eccentric characters such as the Imperial Chaplain, who possesses supernatural powers. With its endless staircases, mechanical gears and a treelike core, the towering interior of the Buddha statue serves as an Escheresque setting for the finale fight, choreographed by veteran action director Sammo Hung (洪金寶).
The computer-generated effects that render Luoyang, the Tang Dynasty capital, as a bustling port city frequented by merchants from across the world at times look distractingly obvious, but the artificiality of the imagery fits the aura of a fantasy.
Though character development is rarely a priority in Tsui’s genre movies, the cast turns in entertainingly generic performances. Carina Lau’s Wu Zeitan is, nevertheless, a big letdown. By reducing the empress’ role to a monarch who simply goes around complaining about how she is despised because she is a woman, the director throws away a great opportunity to explore alternative views of China’s only female monarch, who is often depicted as a Machiavellian tyrant.
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