Summary
A silly remix of the first film, shifting the backdrop from Bangkok to New York. Its also a ridiculous amount of fun. Finally a film that answers the question: “What would a chicken and Spider-Man do in a team-up?”
Sometimes a gag is so disarmingly ludicrous that it bears repeating. The Lunar New Year has given us a slate of blockbuster sequels, from Monster Hunt 2 through to Monkey 3, but DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 2 (唐人街探案2) might be the most fun.
With Chen Sicheng’s follow-up to 2015’s Detective Chinatown, we pick up more or less where we left off in the first chapter. Self-proclaimed ‘Detective Chinatown’ Tang Ren (Wang Baoqiang) tricks his ‘distant relative’ Chin Feng (Liu Haoran) into coming to New York. The bumbling cop and the investigative savant soon find themselves in the middle of the World Detective Contest, and a grisly series of murders plaguing the city.
It’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice, but Chen Sicheng makes a decent attempt in this lighthearted second outing. Despite being a Mainland production shot largely in Bangkok, the first film took us back to the Hong Kong action comedies of the late 1980s/early 1990s. Perhaps its the New York locale, but this entry feels more like an early 2000s Rush Hour franchise outing. However, Chen Sicheng has a more finely tuned sense of the absurd.
DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 2 doesn’t deviate much from the formula laid down in the first movie. The detectives are on the run from the law while attempting to solve the case, pinging around in their underwear and running into a bar full of dancing bikers. For a minor point of difference, they are joined by suspect and pseudo-partner Song Yi (Xiao Yang), and are in the good graces of the attractive law enforcement Chen Ying (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) this time.
The broad comedy is mostly built around the cartoon expressions of Wang Baoqiang, but there’s a curiously buffoonish depiction of the west as well. Most of the Americans featured are either idiots, packing guns, or overweight. The police chief is a bizarre approximation of Donald Trump, spouting lines like “The President should build a wall all along the west coast!” Some of these caricatures are borderline offensive, while others tramp all over that line in blissful ignorance. In fact, the casting department seems to have hired the first westerners to show up to the audition, with only the “special appearance” by Michael Carmen Pitt coming close to anything one might label “acting.”
The slick production values of DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 2 set it apart from similar genre outings. Set to repeated spins of Taylor Swift’s ‘Welcome to New York,’ the city that never sleeps gets some beautiful postcard shots. Chin Feng’s internal CSI point of view of the city is seriously cool, upping the effects from the first film.
Mirroring the original entry’s dark turn in the final act, it’s still all fun and games by the time the dance-filled credits roll. Once again,Chen Sicheng sets us up for the following adventure of Tang Ren and Chin Feng, and a pretty strong indication of which city they’ll be jetting off to next time. If this second outing is any indication, then the third will be a hell of a lot of fun wherever it’s shot.
2018 | China | DIRECTOR: Sicheng Chen | WRITERS: Sicheng Chen | CAST: Wang Baoqiang, Liu Haoran, Xiao Yang,Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Michael Pitt | DISTRIBUTOR: Magnum Films/ChopFlix (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16 February 2018 (AUS)
