In 689 A.D., the Empress Wu Zetian is building a 66m high statue of Buddha for her inauguration as the first empress of China under the objections and conspiracy of the other clans. When the engineer responsible for the construction mysteriously dies by spontaneous combustion, the superstitious workers are afraid since the man removed the good luck banner charms from the main pillar. There is an investigation by Pei Donglai after another person also bursts into flames. Empress Wu assigns her loyal assistant Shangguan Jing’er to release the exiled Detective Dee from his imprisonment for treason to investigate with Donglai and Jing’er the mystery of the deaths.
I’ve got a bit of a love/hate thing with Tsui Hark’s movies. Some of his work such as Once Upon A Time In China movies for instance I really enjoyed watching but others like Green Snake and Zu Warriors I just can’t warm up to them at all. Detective Dee is a movie which I’m finding it hard to be enthusiastic about. It’s a prime example of why I’ve never been a fan of HK’s wirework costume dramas they made years ago. The Detective Dee character is based on the Chinese folk hero Di Renjie who remains a popular figure from China’s Tang Dynasty who ruled from the 7th to 10th centuries. The story is engrossing enough and comes across as being fresh and inventive. We don’t usually see many (if any?) Chinese detective movies set in the past. Where it goes wrong is by using too many CGI effects in that some of it looks bad but admittedly the large Buddha statue which is the focus of the movie looks impressive. The action sequences which were choreographed by Sammo Hung is good and exciting but once the characters start flying about on buildings and trees I started to lose interest. Even a sequence with Dee fighting off a herd of ‘magic’ deer had me rolling my eyes. When the movie concentrates on the mystery itself and how Dee goes about trying to solve the bizarre spontaneous human combustion cases the story excels but it veers off too many times for my liking. The running time could have been cut by a good 30 mins to make the pacing a bit better. The sets and the lavish costumes are nice. Andy Lau gives an assured performance as the wary but inquisitive Dee. He gets strong support from Li Bingbing as a beautiful femme fatale. Carina Lau also performs well as the hardened Empress who has managed to thrive in an altogether male-dominated political world.
Whilst I might not like Detective Dee that much as I probably like my HK movies to be grounded in reality, I’m sure this movie will have a lot of fans especially with many people saying that this movie represents director Tsui Hark back on top form.
Sadako’s Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
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