User Reviews

SHANGHAI GRAND (Xin Shang Hai Tan)

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Dolby Stereo

In wartime Shanghai, a Taiwanese revolutionary (Leslie Cheung) and an ambitious gangster (Andy Lau) forge a criminal empire within the city's underworld, but they're torn apart by a rival gangster's beautiful daughter (Ning Jing).

Director Poon Man-kit scores a bullseye with this uncompromising wartime thriller, a big-screen version of the 1980 TV drama "Shanghai Bund" (which, amongst other things, established Chow Yun-fat as a major star throughout SE Asia), co-financed by Win's Entertainment and Tsui Hark's Film Workshop. Nostalgic, romantic and primed to the max, the film's melodramatic plot line is reinforced by a number of eye-popping set-pieces, laced with unexpected savagery. Like many of his contemporaries, Poon - who helmed the equally brutal TO BE NUMBER ONE in 1991 - finds poetry in images of violence (such as Cheung standing in a shower of blood beneath a cage where his friends have been machine-gunned to death), and these highlights are directed with consummate cinematic precision.

Beautifully designed by Bruce Yu, and photographed by world-class cinematographer Poon Hang-sang on sets constructed for Chen Kaige's TEMPTRESS MOON (1996), SHANGHAI GRAND has the look and feel of a flamboyant, pumped-up Warner Bros. melodrama of the 1930's and 40's, toplined by two of the most beautiful actors working in Hong Kong at the time (Lau and Cheung make a formidable team in one of their few on-screen pairings). Mainland actress Ning is miscast in an underwritten role, and she's completely sidelined by Amanda Lee as a seductive - but ruthless - killer who enjoys torturing her victims to death. Her demise, when it comes, is as spectacular as it is welcome!

Poon's script (co-written by Sandy Shaw and Matt Chow) focuses chiefly on the friendship which unites - and eventually destroys - the two main characters, building to one of the most sensational finales this reviewer has ever seen: Poon stages the breathtaking climactic shoot-out during raucous New Year's Eve celebrations in the vicinity of a crowded bar-room, and he uses the Dolby soundtrack as ironic counterpoint to the on-screen drama. In fact, the movie reaches its emotional summit during this extraordinary sequence when one of the characters falls victim to a dreadful misunderstanding, culminating in a moment of sublime cinematic tragedy that elevates SHANGHAI GRAND to the level of greatness. It takes enormous talent (and courage) for any filmmaker to convey so much heartbreak and heroism whilst simultaneously igniting the screen with so much action! Fans of HK cinema won't be disappointed by this superlative offering.

(Cantonese dialogue)

This is one of the movies that Tsui Hark's had his hands in, and when that happens, one can expect a pretty good movie. Tsui Hark is one of Hong Kong's most influential producer/directors, and there is very little that he has not been involved in nor who he has worked with. Many of his movies are of high quality and Shanghai Grand is no exception.

The movie is about three people, Ding Lik, Chung Chung Fey, and Hui Kueng. It opens with Kueng on a boat captured by Japanese and he manages to escape where he is washed ashore in Shanghai and found by Ding Lik, a dogs body for the local crime gang. When Lik sees the girl he likes, Fey, kidnapped by the local gang, he intervenes and earns himself the gang's enmity.

The plot itself is complicated, but what it does is that it examines the lives of these three people and how they have become interwoven. We watch the rise of Ding Lik, and we what Hui Kueng try to hang on to his life as he has enemies everywhere. I was not really sure who Hui was, but the cover of the video says that he was a Taiwanese spy in the Japanese Army (the movie is set in the 1930's) and that the Japanese are chasing him.

Shanghai Grand is really a character study in these three people, much like the Killer is a character study as well. The difference here is that the lives of the main characters are heavily intertwined in a way that I won't fully explain least I spoil some parts of the movie. What I can say is that it is a tragedy, as are a lot of non-American movies (and some American movies are quite tragic, but not all of them).