Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (2018)
This time, the detective must defend himself.
It’s been a while so I’ll forgive anyone who forgot, but some may recall a long while ago I mentioned how I love a series from overseas centering around a certain detective character. Now, China has a bunch of good movies - I’m sure plenty of them never even made it over here for me to check out. Well, they’ve been in and out of Netflix, but I think it’s about time I return to the series that taught me perhaps I have a fascination with characters with single-syllable names: Detective Dee takes on The Four Heavenly Kings.
To start it off, this would be number three - the original (set last, made first), then they released the prequel, then this one. What this does mean is that there’s some moments that could be more rich if you have previous knowledge of the franchise. Luckily enough though, you wouldn’t find it exceptionally necessary to have seen the others to really enjoy the movie, as each of the movies is much like Indiana Jones as a comparison more might be familiar with. Each has it’s own story, and although the character exists across all of them under the assumption of the same timeline, the stories themselves don’t require the others as presented on screen. A great example of this is how the movie starts off - Dee being presented with the legendary mace as a result of his actions in the prequel Young Dee film. However, it’s stated why he’s being granted the weapon in the movie, so if you haven’t seen the other movie it doesn’t impact the story - but if you have seen it, it solves the age old “show don’t tell” problem a lot of movies have where the most interesting parts are just mentioned instead of shown. So what you should take away from all this rambling is that if this is the only one you’ve got around, you can still watch it and have fun without having seen the backlog.
The story follows our detective trying to solve a mystery, as normal. In this case, the Empress seems to have it out for him, and mysterious magic-like events are afoot. Amusingly, A good portion of this movie isn’t entirely focused on Dee, hopping between his sworn brother character and a young medical type working under Dee at the bureau. This spreads events out more, allowing us as the audience to experience more of the movie happenings - but does have the side effects of not having as long to show Dee working things out. Most the times we see him in the movie, he’s actually experimenting with something to figure it out, or investigating a scene though so it doesn’t feel too far removed. Things are further complicated in the story when there seems to be more than one group of magicians behind the scene, and a far more nefarious plot than a power-hungry Empress lurks on the prowl for our hero. A romance sub-story exists with one of the side characters, although I’m not going to really call it a strong romance story. Considering it’s a side-off story in the first place, I guess it’s to be expected that it won’t be the most impressive thing, but it works enough.
The actors do a decent enough job, but as often with foreign films I really can’t speak for the line deliveries. Facial expressions can be emotive, so you get plenty of comedy or feeling out of that to go along with the body language. There’s plenty of moments where characters are acting against effects as well, so it really didn’t seem like anyone was doing too poorly a job compared to some of the stuff I’ve seen out of things like the plethora of items to come out of Asylum. There’s some characters who have more to work with than others - the Emperor, for example, has very little screen time and as such might not feel like a very impressive character. The sworn brother character is in the movie plenty, and can frequently swap between seeming like he’s very stoic at one point to over the top exasperated scene-chewing other times. It isn’t really necessarily off for the character in the situations he’s in, but viewer enjoyment of such things may be a bit less unanimous.
“Good luck” charm.
When it comes to action, when has China ever really let us down? Things are quite well choreographed, and most action scenes are high energy and cleanly shot. There’s some pretty out there moments, as plenty of the action scenes will involve at least some kind of effects as well - be it a giant monkey or fire and people turning into monsters. It can be chaotic at times - the ending action set has a ton of people in it at once - but most are easy enough to follow as far as spatial placement goes. There’s a few that tell stories through the action, although honestly some of them are really just there for a high point that moves the plot along. Of course, the effects are generally lined up pretty well with the action on scenes, but I guess that’s probably a good time to segue into the next department huh?
Effects are largely good. Yes, some aren’t the best. Some aren’t exactly believable - not that a giant person made of eyes is really meant to be super believable from our standpoint - but they are well enough done. While you may not be personally blown away by it, there’s a care of detail to them. An example of this is anytime someone is playing with fire through magic, where the sparks and flames cast a light onto the character. Yes, it might be at a basic sort of level as opposed to every single individual spark casting light - but it’s enough to make it feel like it’s believably there in movie, regardless of if you believe the fire is real itself. Of course, being an ancient China kind of movie, we also have plenty of outfits to work with, with characters being pretty distinguished from each other even when in similar costumes. With the inclusion or royalty, you know that you’ll end up seeing some pretty gorgeous fancy outfits. With the inclusion of sorcerous assassins, you know you’ll get interesting designs to make them stand out or blend in. We have hunched old ladies with a penchant for combusting, or a flute-wielding magician with extra arms, and even a brutish man with twin wicked curved tonfa-like swords. Of course, there’s a good handful of props as well to go along with them - like all the weapons. People might not be blown out of the water with some of the effects, but I think a lot of whats there should give plenty of enjoyment.
Audio is good. Balance is well, no problem hearing any line deliveries - even if I don’t understand any of it. Subtitles are fine, with only one moment where the words got blended together to create one new combined word. Of course, there’s always the cultural divide where I might not get some of the intricacies that could be lost in translation - both visually or audibly - and since there is no Dub track (as far as I’m aware) some people might be turned off by the prospect of reading. Still, I find it a fun story set in a distant land, and a lot of the concepts that might be in there - overthrowing empires, friendships, romance, honor - are stuff that’s relatively universal.
Perhaps we should fight fire with fire.
Yeah, I still like these movies. If someone wanted me to tell them what it was similar too because they weren’t familiar with foreign movies, I’d have to tell them it’s like a Chinese Sherlock Holmes. When they asked which Holmes, I would just shrug and tell them they’d need to watch it to find out. It’s fun, it has some moments of mystery to it - largely rotating around the sorcery and magic, which is somewhat funny since we know mystical things do exist in the franchise already so to see someone questioning it might come off as silly. It’s got some good action, a decent enough story, and plenty of fun effects that tie in.