WIND BLAST [XI FENG LIE | 西風烈]

http://xifenglie.ent.sina.com.cn/main.html

CHINA 2010 Directed by: Gao Qunshu Cinematography: Du Jie Cast: Francis Ng, Xia Yu, Charlie Yeung, Duan Yihong, Wu Jing, Ni Dahong, Zhang Li

Four detectives are assigned to track down a murder suspect who has fled with his girlfriend, but not without taking a photo of the one who hired him beforehand. They follow him into a vast desert where they run into two top assassins who turn the manhunt into a high-octane cat-and-mouse game, reversing the roles of the hunters and the hunted.

It’s a bit like watching the finale of THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY for about two hours. Then again, nothing compares to Leone’s original. WIND BLAST, Gao Qunshu’s Neo-Western, is as hard to grab – and as fast-moving – as quicksand. There is no story, and the film concentrates entirely on the duel between the various parties. And even then, the action creates spikes and not a consistent flow of events. Somewhere between the landscape and the shootouts time stands still – despite the breakneck pace, the movie keeps circling without ever getting out of the treadmill.

There are relationships, maybe even loyalties, but there are no real reasons why everyone is doing what he or she is doing. Apart from the thrills the film is mostly contemplating, filled with thoughts, reflections, and a few insights shared by the characters, yet this doesn’t make WIND BLAST the next CHUNGKING EXPRESS. Not that Gao Qunshu is trying: WIND BLAST is an exercise in action choreography, and as the film is a western movie homage it seems more concerned with replacing horses with cars, the Grand Canyon with the Gobi desert and John Wayne with Francis Ng than with telling a story. WIND BLAST is a fair attempt to join the club of new school western films made in Asia, but where the western genre will never be out of fashion, everything that possibly can be said has been said this way or another. WIND BLAST is kind of late even by Asian standards, bearing in mind that filmmakers like Johnnie To, John Woo or Wai Ka-Fai toyed around with the western and its ingredients already decades ago.

So it all comes down to the question if you fancy a film with a whole lot of formidable action but no plot, no point, not even a plot point. WIND BLAST may feature eye-popping visuals, excellent choreography and some fine performances, but we never care about any of the characters who stay strangers to the audience from beginning to end. As for the action, it tends to get tiring after a while, and I have seen other directors making more out of a location like that. The scenery may be impressive, but it isn’t put to good use as there is no orientation point for the viewer and therefore dramatization falls short.

WIND BLAST will entertain you for a while, and it definitely has its moments, but very little about the movie is genuine or interesting. Watching it once isn’t a waste of time, but it certainly is more than enough. Once the dust settles it becomes clear that WIND BLAST isn’t much of a blast, but rather gone with the wind indeed.

This entry was posted on 2010/11/29 at 22:47 and is filed under HK YEAR OF PRODUCTION 2010, TITLE W, TITLE X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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