Railroad Tigers (Ding Sheng) [Archive]

Stay Puft

01-22-2017, 01:43 PM

Another tepid, haphazard blockbuster from mainland China. The industry there is aping Hollywood pretty well at this point, what can I say. It's too bad, because some of the material is good. There are some clever, fun and funny sequences throughout, but so much of the film's goodwill is undercut by some seriously poor execution. There's more coverage and random shot selection in this thing than three Michael Bay movies combined. Some sequences are just straight up incompetent in how poorly edited together they are, from the rhythm of a scene to even basic things like conveying narrative information. I laughed a bit, I was often smiling, but at the end of the day I cannot abide such poor filmmaking. It's the most disposable of disposable entertainment. It hurts to see Jackie Chan spending the remainder of his career like this. Also, it reminded me a bit of stuff like Tsui Hark's The Taking of Tiger Mountain because it has an utterly pointless framing device set in the modern era. There must be a cultural thing I'm missing here... why do Chinese films keep doing this?