This movie is available for purchase at www.hkflix.com

Rating:

6

AKA: Chinese Central

Year of release: 1994

Genre: drama/action

Director: David Lai

Action director: Yuen Tak

Producers: Charles Heung, Andy Lau

Stars: Andy Lau, Damian Lau, Cherie Chan, Gu Bao-Ming, Chin Shih-Chieh

Rated IIB for violence, language, and drug use

DVD Information

Company: China Entertainment

Format: widescreen

Languages: Cantonese, Mandarin

Subtitles: Chinese/English (burned-in)

Extras: none

Notes: A very low-budget DVD; I'm surprised this even has a menu screen. It also seemed to have a few cuts for violence.

Movie Review Index / Main Page

Tian Di

With more than a little inspiration from De Palma's The Untouchables, David Lai's Tian Di is a violent period crime film that stars Andy Lau as a special government investigator who is sent to Shanghai to stomp the rampant trading of opium. The big problem is that everyone, including the local police force, seems to be under the thumb of the city's biggest crime boss (Damian Lau). Taking along a couple of loyal allies, Andy sets out to clean out Shanghai, and begins to find some success, only to soon learn that he might lose everything he holds dear in the process.

Frankly, for about the first hour or so, Tian Di is a pretty boring movie. Characters are introduced and conflicts are set up, but nothing much seems to happen. One gets the sense that this movie was rushed through production to capitalize on Andy Lau's growing popularity. Seeing as how Tian Di came from Wong Jing's Jin Productions studio, which was cranking out several films a month at this point in time, "rushed" probably isn't strong enough of a word. It feels like the first or second take was used for a lot of the scenes. The script uses a lot of cliches and the acting is downright wooden at points, especially when Andy is supposed to be getting fired up or feeling sad -- he keeps the same expression on his mug throughout the movie. And there's little panache in the camerawork or editing; the film-makers go to the Woo-inspired slow-motion too many times to try and spice things up.

However, during the last half-hour, action director Yuen Tak seems to have totally taken over the production, and the action quotient goes through the roof. It's nothing on the level of classics of the heroic bloodshed genre -- in fact, it veers dangeorusly close to the point of cheesiness in parts, since the bad guys can't hit anything with machine guns, and, of course, Andy can take them all out with a single pistol. But there are plenty of flying bullets and splattering blood, which should satisfy the action junkies out there, provided they can wade through the dull exposition first.