Movie Review: Bad Blood/滅門

I saw Bad Blood/滅門last week at the Dynasty. As you ought to know by now, The Die Nasty is the theatre of choice for films that fall a bit short of most people's Must See lists.

But I'm not a snob, and the trailer looked fun, and it's the Dynasty, and it's Movie Night, and I don't go to the movies for edification. I go to be entertained.Bad Blood/滅門certainly entertains, both intentionally and unintentionally. It's a genre movie through and through and will not be an awards contender, but its still worth a look.

On DVD.

The story of a power struggle within a gang, the film moves along a fairly well-trodden path towards a fairly inevitable conclusion. Along the way, though, there are moments that made me glad I watched it, and these days that's enough.

The highlights of the film?

Andy On's performance. His acting andhis action have both moved up a notch, and his is the most actedcharacter in the film.

I'm not being polite, or nice, or gassing up a fellow Rhode Islander.

He's acting, and a lot of his fellow actors are pretty much going through the motions. He brings depth, humanity, and reality to his character, which is made all the more vivid by the cardboard caricatures usually surrounding him.

Jiang Luxia is impressive as a martially adept mute woman who has a crush on someone. Playing a mute solves the Mandarin issue. Her role, although small, is well acted and convincing.Hopefully she'll be in a lot more movies and we can watch her develop her acting and screen fighting skills. It would be great if she could work with Yuen Wo Ping or Cory Yuen.She good enough with martial arts that I might even get over the inevitable Cantonese Ventriloquism.Chan Wai Man returns to the screen, albeit in an odd (and very gray) Beatles hairdo. His biggest scene is also a (very likely unintentional) homage to The Club, one of the earliest (and best) goo wak jaimovies that is sadly almost impossible to see.3) Candy Hau Woon-Ling. I think she'll outlive me, and she deserves to. Her role is small, but her presence is large. She the kind of grandmother I used to have, and I would love to see her star in a film at least once before it is too late, because she's capable, deserving, and it would be absolutely spellbinding. She's got to be in her 90s, and she has more life left in her than I do. 

The lowlights ofBad Blood/滅門?

The direction. Dennis Law is so full of himself he actually made himself a character in his last film, A Very Short Life. The only redeeming quality of thatfilm was being spared the sight of Samuel Pang's love tackle.

I'm all for verisimilitude, but when you have dialogue about everyone gathering in a room for a meeting, you don't have to show everyone gathering in the room.

How does Andy On adopt a pre-teen who then grows to adulthood while he doesn't age?

Dennis Law has a foot fetish, judging from the screen time Pinky Cheung's toes get.One of the biggest failures/distractions ofBad Blood/滅門 was Bernice Liu as a bad girl.

Badly actinggirl, yes. Bad girl, no.

Wooden acting and lousy action execution are hardly the way to my heart. The only good thing about her was that her poor performance of her character made it easier to dislike her character.

If that makes sense, which it probably doesn't.

But I should really give her props. With nothing but a pair of common scissors and a mirror, her character gave herself a salon-perfect bob in 5 minutes, and didn't leave a hair out place or on her shoulders.That particular bit of laziness/hubris/ stupidity is emblematic of my biggest problem with the film. It often comes off as dumb, slap-dash, or gleefully ignorant of its own shoddiness.

In the old days, you could get away with it because the films were often visually arresting. Not this one.

This film eats donuts and rousts hookers for free blowjobs.

Sure, evil bad woman can stand in the road and, as the SUV passes at about 50mph, reach up to the luggage rack and pull herself up onto the speeding car. 

Without dislocating her shoulder to the same degree a baby elephant stretches something else.

That same car, owned as it is by an incredibly wealthy gangster family, is still pragmatic enough to have a (highly convenient)  10-gallon jerrycan of gasoline where the spare tire should be.

On the backof the vehicle.

To make it easier to hit.

Too many characters in this film are so profoundly stupid that they make the "Hey, you guys, I know you're there in the basement with the lights off, so I'll just come down and find you..." characters seem Shakespearean by comparison.

One of the film's few redeeming qualities is that these stupid people often die as a result of their stupidity, something I wish happened more often in real life.

Hell, I wish it were thelaw.

The biggest " F@#$ you" to the audience springs from what I can only imagine is laziness and a disregard for the discernment faculties of the audience, i.e. "No one will ever notice, it's not important."

 Jiang Luxia's character, mute as she is, communicates through writing on her phone. She holds up the message when its done rather than sending it (SMS costs $, you know).

First of all, she'd beat the @ss off of any other competitor in those speed-writing contests. She writes 12 characters a second, on average.

But the really awful part was when she held up her "message" to be read and it was clearly the phone's menu screen.

No, no, Dennis, leave them there on my chin. I don't even notice.

I guess that last line makes it hard for me to say you should watch this film (or speak to me in public). But you should, because it has its moments, and those moments are good. The rest of it, while often overblown, ridiculous, and enervating, is also, mercifully, pretty forgettable.