lunarriviera

highkey surprised to emerge from this film and find out it wasn't actually four hours long, because it felt like i'd shotgunned an entire season of a draggy cdrama—and i say this as a fan of both zhu yilong and tan jianci. honestly, han yan could have easily cut 40 minutes from this (probably half that from the unendingly gratuitous torture scene, yes we get it the triad are bad dudes okay) and then added back in another ten minutes of the two of them simmering at each other, and this would have been a much better picture. worth it, i guess, just for big tony (without him they wouldn't have had a film at all) and some flashy and well-edited heist/caper set pieces, also a few nice period details that sort of get buried in the dubious handover politics. it does seem like they had a lot of fun making this; long-ge in particular always loves playing The Crazy One so this caters to his strengths, but tan-laoshi has the much more difficult role, and he really brought his A-game to it. come for z1l's prosthetic broken nose and convulsive dramatic sniffling, stay for kenzi bawling his way through a genuinely hilarious guangxi accent.