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Stay Puft
02-11-2019, 06:26 AM
FEI CHI REN SHENG / PEGASUS
Dir. Han Han

https://i.imgur.com/pP3u6Pr.jpg

IMDb page (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9597190/)

Stay Puft
02-11-2019, 06:54 AM
Oops, my screen jumped and I clicked on nay. I meant to vote yay. I actually enjoyed this quite a bit.

Out of the two films I've seen so far that premiered on the Chinese New Year, this is easily my favorite. (But, again, The Wandering Earth... when I got out of my screening for Pegasus, there was a screening of The Wandering Earth in the theatre across the hall, and the temptation to go in and watch it again was definitely strong. Even though it's not a good movie?) I'm seeing one more tomorrow, Alan Mak's Integrity. Stephen Chow's new movie, inexplicably, is not playing here.

This is a sports comedy about a rally car driver (Han Han was himself a rally driver in a former life), banned from competition for five years after getting caught in a police crackdown on illegal street racing. He's eager to win back his honor and prove he can still compete with a newer, younger, fiercer generation of rally drivers.

It's ridiculously funny. The story is a fairly rote comeback tale, and a lot of it is sort of sloppily pieced together, but individual scenes are quite strong. Han Han has good comedic rhythm, and knows how to build a scene, reverse or undercut expectations, and deliver strong punchlines. He also uses some of these gags and humorous reversals to deliver social commentary. There's a great scene involving a vintage bottle of wine, or another where our hero Chi Zhang and his co-driver get emotional over reuniting with the busted frame of their old rally car, which the film immediately undercuts by revealing they've been looking at the wrong car the whole time. It's a small moment, and really just looks like a simple joke on the surface, but it encodes a certain attitude in the film about the way we build and understand emotional connections to the people, places, and things around us; the film's heart is hidden in the smallest details, like the off-handed reveal that Chi's son is not his biological son (this is not a spoiler, it occurs early and literally has no bearing on the plot).

Han Han's background as a rally driver lends a lot of specificity and confidence to the proceedings as well. I think the film stumbles by leaning too hard into the dramatic comeback story in the second half; its strength is its comedy, and it eventually loses sight of the laughs a bit, trading them in for narrative clichés. Eh, but the rally sequence in the third act is really engaging, even for someone like me who knew next to nothing about this sport going into the movie. It defied my expectations in terms of how I expected the final "race" to be constructed, actually pulling the focus away from a dramatic "final confrontation" to explore the minutiae of how the sport actually works, the components of the car, the environmental factors, the way rally racing actually works logistically... I'd get it if people thought a lot of this was boring, but I found it quite interesting. I was really getting into it.

And then of course the ending is just flat-out ridiculous. It ends abruptly, but the final image is sort of incredible.

Anyways, I liked it. The lead actor, Shen Teng, is hilarious. I know it doesn't say much right now, but this is probably my favorite movie released so far in 2019.