Chung King Express

Directed by Wong Kar-wai, Chung King Express follows two police officers (Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Qiwu and Tony Leung’s Cop 663) as they attempt to move on with their lives in the wake of their respective breakups. Filmmaker Wong, working from his own screenplay, delivers a visually-striking drama that unfortunately grows less and less engaging as it progresses, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that the viewer’s ongoing efforts at working up any real interest in or sympathy for the central characters’ exploits fall flat on an increasingly (and distressingly) regular basis – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by an excessively deliberate pace and second half that’s often intolerably quirky and whimsical. (Leung’s character comforts his inanimate possessions and eventually finds himself pursued by an almost unreasonably off-kilter figure, for example.) It’s clear, then, that Chung King Express is generally only effective (and affecting) in all-too-brief fits and starts, with the sporadically spellbinding cinematography, by Christopher Doyle and Andrew Lau, undoubtedly playing a key role in ensuring that the film is, at the very least, always compelling on a purely visceral level – although, on the flip-side of that coin, Wong’s periodic reliance on weird instances of motion blur are, to put it mildly, regrettable. The end result is a romantic drama that isn’t, by and large, nearly as engrossing as Wong has surely intended, with the movie’s failure due in no small part to the filmmaker’s reluctance (or refusal) to infuse his female characters with distinctive, three-dimensional attributes (ie they’re wish-fulfillment figures, for the most part).

** out of ****