It's December of 1941. John Cusack is an American spy, masquerading as a reporter in the last major city in China not controlled by the Japanese.
It's a visually stunning movie, with the city reproduced on sets in Bangkok and London; it was supposed to shoot in China, but the government vetoed that weeks before the shooting was scheduled to shoot. The movie is well cast, with Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li, David Morse and Ken Watanabe, but there is a mannered air about the whole story that tells you every moment that you are looking at a fiction. That makes it less than engrossing, as does the low lighting levels, which have become a bit of a cliche in the last decade or so.
It's a visually stunning movie, with the city reproduced on sets in Bangkok and London; it was supposed to shoot in China, but the government vetoed that weeks before the shooting was scheduled to shoot. The movie is well cast, with Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li, David Morse and Ken Watanabe, but there is a mannered air about the whole story that tells you every moment that you are looking at a fiction. That makes it less than engrossing, as does the low lighting levels, which have become a bit of a cliche in the last decade or so.