Mermaid (2016)

03 Friday Jun 2016

Tags

China, Comedy, Conservation, Deng Chao, Drama, Fantasy, Green Gulf, Lin Yun, Mermaids, Octopus, Review, Romance, Stephen Chow, Zhang Yuqi

Original title: Mei ren yu

D: Stephen Chow / 94m

Cast: Deng Chao, Lin Yun, Zhang Yuqi, Show Luo, Hark Tsui, Kris Wu, Zhang Wen

Already the highest grossing Chinese movie ever at the international box office – over half a billion dollars and counting – Stephen Chow’s Mermaid is a sweet-natured fantasy, with strong romantic overtones, and enough comic moments to make it one of the funniest movies of the year. It’s a movie that deserves its success, and despite a limited release in the US and most other territories back in February, should be seen by as many people as possible.

It’s a movie with an environmental message as well. Beginning with scenes that could put off some viewers, especially those who love animals, Chow’s latest sees playboy industrialist and developer Liu Xuan (Deng) acquire a wildlife reserve called Green Gulf with a view to using the area as a sea reclamation project. In partnership with Ruolan (Zhang Yuqi), Liu Xuan plans to use sonar devices to scare off the marine wildlife and use the project to make even more obscene amounts of money than he’s already got. What he doesn’t realise is that his plan will affect not only the local marine wildlife, but has already affected a group of mermaids (and an octopus) that live in the bowels of a shipwrecked tanker in the gulf. Aware of his plan, the merpeople have decided to send an emissary to get to know him and then kill him.

Their emissary is Sham (Lin), a young mermaid who has discovered a love of chicken, and music and dancing in her brief time out of water. She manages to meet Liu Xuan but he doesn’t pay her much attention, and it’s not until some time later that he calls her wanting to meet up. When he does and Sham finally gets to be alone with him, she finds herself beginning to like Liu Xuan, so much so that she’s unable to go through with the plan to kill him. The next day, Liu Xuan takes her out and asks her to marry him; he’s fallen in love with Sham’s appealing nature, and the fact that she’s not interested in his wealth. But when Sham says no, Liu Xuan goes to her home to get her to change her mind and finds himself captured by the merpeople, who tell him about the real effects that his sonar devices are having. Just as Octopus (Luo) is about to kill Liu Xuan, Sham helps him escape.

Coming to terms with the fact that the love of his life is half-human, half-fish, and that his sonar devices will cause her and the rest of the merpeople harm, Liu Xuan has the devices turned off. He tells Ruolan the reason why, and is shocked to learn that she has known about their existence all along – and wants to hunt them down. Outmanoeuvred by his business partner, Liu Xuan has no choice but to try and reach Sham and the merpeople, and warn them before it’s too late…

One thing to know in advance about Mermaid is that it’s a fairy tale, a fabulous concoction that features all the basic elements of a fairy tale, and which has the traditional fairy tale ending where good (in this case a reformed Liu Xuan) triumphs over evil (his money and power-obsessed partner, Ruolan). It’s a feelgood movie, entertaining and satisfying for the way in which it blends its environmental message into a narrative that is both fantastical and determinedly romantic, while also providing some huge laughs. Chow, whose previous credits include Shaolin Soccer (2001) and Kung Fu Hustle (2004), has fashioned the kind of family-friendly movie that can be enjoyed by all ages and he’s done so using a great deal of infectious charm.

It’s also unapologetically a Chinese movie, which means that some of the humour may seem a little juvenile, or off, at times – one scene, where Octopus has to submit to having his tenatacles turned into sushi is likely to have Western audiences questioning whether or not such submissive mutilation is truly a source for laughter – but if you go with it there’s lots to enjoy, a goofy, carefree sense of mischief that’s hard to ignore. The movie’s funniest scene comes after Liu Xuan escapes from the tanker and tries to report what’s happened to the local police. Mermaid is worth seeing purely for the various mermaid drawings one of the officers comes up with.

Set against this is the kind of heightened, bordering on ridiculously saccharine romance that only the Chinese can do so well, with Liu Xuan’s and Sham’s relationship encountering the type of unforeseen obstacles that would cause most couples to call it a day, but which here serve only to strengthen their feelings for each other. From the scene where they serenade each other with Liu Xuan’s favourite song, to the moment where Sham saves his life, their relationship is peppered with the type of challenges that only true love was designed to overcome. Both Deng and Lin have enormous fun with their roles, and this translates to the screen, making their scenes together a joy to watch (and even more so when you consider that Lin, who’d never acted before, won her role through taking part in a talent contest-cum-audition).

There are faults, however. Chow changes the tone too many times to make the movie feel like a cohesive whole, and viewers may find themselves confused by some of Chow’s decisions both as co-screenwriter (with seven others!) and director. And while the visual effects are by and large very successful indeed, some of them are decidedly second-rate as well, and often in a scene where they’ve already been hugely impressive. But these aren’t enough to detract from the overall enjoyment the movie provides, and the often childlike sense of wonder it manages to instill.

Rating: 8/10 – a wonderful surprise for anyone who takes the time to watch it, Mermaid has heart and soul and charm by the bucket load; with terrific performances from its two leads, and a knowing sense of its own absurdity, it’s a movie that rewards the viewer over and over again without even trying too hard.

The Hallow (2015) and the Curse of “Good” Horror Movies

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Black goo, Bojana Novakovic, Changeling, Conservation, Corin Hardy, Drama, Faeries, Horror, Ireland, Irish folklore, Joseph Mawle, Review, Thriller, Tree felling

Original title: The Woods

D: Corin Hardy / 97m

Cast: Joseph Mawle, Bojana Novakovic, Michael McElhatton, Michael Smiley

Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, The Hallow has garnered a great deal of positive buzz about it, with even some mainstream critics won over by its combination of rural Ireland setting and demonic creatures from Irish folklore (they’re a difficult bunch to please, mainstream critics; horror isn’t a genre they particularly care for). But while it’s always good to hear any horror movie get a positive response, when it comes from the mainstream it’s always worrying, as it raises expectations a little too high. The Babadook (2014) is a recent case in point, being a horror movie that William Friedkin avowed would “scare the hell out of you as it did me” (the movie is good, just not that good).

So is The Hallow in the same (presumed) league? When the movie was in production it certainly looked like it would be, and the initial response coming out of Sundance was encouraging, but now that the movie is available to a wider, more fan-based audience, it seems that our hopes have been cruelly dashed once again. For what begins as a creepy, atmospheric twist on the home invasion genre soon descends into the kind of aimless let’s-run-around-the-woods-in-circles-over-and-over-again scenario that we’ve seen countless times before. It’s not fun to watch, and once again it involves a female character having to make stupid mistakes in an attempt to generate tension. It doesn’t matter how many times we see this kind of thing, it always means one thing: the writers – in this case director Hardy and Felipe Marino – have run out of story ideas.

The set up here is a simple one: an English conservationist, Adam Hitchens (Mawle), moves with his family to Ireland where his job is to earmark trees in a forest for future felling. This angers not only the locals but ensures he earns the wrath of the faery creatures who live in the forest. In retaliation for his marking the trees with white X’s, they mount a terror campaign that involves breaking windows and skittering about just out of sight of the house where Adam lives. So far it’s a fairly standard set up, with Adam refusing to take notions of angry faery folk seriously, and falling back on unlikely scientific or rational explanations as the cause of all the strange happenings (the bird that’s had a few is a good one).

And of course, while Adam is busy ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of his eyes, and on the camera that he doesn’t refer back to after he’s snapped one of the snarling faeries, his increasingly beleaguered wife, Clare (Novakovic), is doing her best to hold it all together. This involves going along with Adam’s weak reassurances that faeries don’t exist and that he can deal with whatever is “out there”. And then there’s their child, Finn, the obvious target of the creatures, and continually placed in danger by his in-denial parents. (There’s a point where it becomes clear that if you mess with the faeries then they’ll come and swap your child for a changeling – which begs the question, what if you don’t have any children?) With the two main characters behaving like they’ve left their brains behind in England, The Hallow stutters through a middle third that sees them make one hare-brained mistake after another (seriously – who looks through a keyhole to see if the creature that’s been outside banging on the door has gone away?).

One critic has stated that the movie is “visually energized” and “dynamically paced”, and while it’s been very well shot by DoP Martijn van Broekhuizen – his use of low light levels is particularly good – the idea that it’s “dynamically paced” is stretching things. If there is any energy to the movie it’s sucked right out in the movie’s final third, as Clare’s attempts to flee with baby Finn fail, succeed, fail, possibly succeed, fail – you get the idea. At the same time, Adam, who’s fallen foul of an unfortunate poke in the eye (wonder where he got that from?) is in danger of becoming one of the faery folk, transforming as he is thanks to the demands of the script rather than any accepted piece of folklore. He joins Clare in wandering through the forest but he does it in a much cooler way, brandishing a flaming scythe, and waving it in a non-menacing way at any creature that hisses at him.

To be fair, the creatures/faeries/offspring of the Newborn from Alien: Resurrection (1997) (take your pick) are very well designed and executed by British SFX artist John Nolan, and are surprisingly effective despite being actors in suits backed up by a sparse use of CGI augmentation. Alas, Hardy chooses to make them only occasionally threatening, and even then in a way that won’t have audiences reaching for a cushion to hide behind. With their provenance limited to “well, it’s their forest, so you don’t mess with it”, the faeries’ physical appearance is left unexplained, and their actions are less persuasive, as Hardy chooses to strip any magical qualities they might have out of the script at the earliest opportunity. This leaves the notion of the changeling as the only supernatural aspect of the entire movie, and even then the reason for this occurring is dulled by the knowledge that the daughter of one of the villager’s was kidnapped by them, but no replacement was sent back.

Hardy has stated that he wanted to give the narrative “a more rational, scientific base than the traditional magic-based fable”, and to this end he introduces early on a black goo-like substance that has aggressive parasitic qualities. Whether this is produced by the faeries or works independently of them is never properly explained, but in either case it doesn’t bode well if you’re an animal or an unlucky conservationist, or just a viewer trying to work out why it’s there in the first place (except to set up a potential sequel, or an X-Files crossover). It’s an idea that ultimately isn’t given enough room to breathe, and like so many of the ideas Hardy populates the script with, is subsumed by the need to put Adam and Clare in as much peril as possible.

The main problem – and the “curse” alluded to in this post’s title – is that The Hallow, like a lot of modern horror movies that gain a degree of critical approval, tries hard to be different from the hundreds of other horror movies out there but still manages to make the same mistakes that all the rest do: it never manages to provide the audience with characters it can care about, it puts them in evermore ridiculous situations, has them behave irrationally (and run around in those ever decreasing circles), focuses more on the special effects, and abandons its own internal logic in favour of a semi-bravura showdown between the hero (or heroine) and the villain(s). It’s a shame that so few directors of horror movies understand what actually works, but every week we’re confronted with the evidence that supports this, whether it’s the latest franchise cash-in that just repeats the mistakes of its predecessors (and usually on a smaller budget), yet another serial killer/haunted house/paranormal activity variation, or something that has ideas above its station. But if one thing can be relied on, it’s that horror movie fans must be the most forgiving fans out there, because they keep on coming back for more, and that in itself is more scary than a whole host of horror pretenders.

Rating: 5/10 – bolstered by its visual style and location shooting, The Hallow looks the business but fails to deliver in terms of scares, thrills or credibility; a worthy effort, though a bit like the horror movie version of The Emperor’s New Clothes, and the first movie to show how easy it is to kick through the back seat of a car from the confined space of the boot.