What better way to celebrate Chinese new year than with this film? Erm … actually, there are a number of activities that might be better. It’s a broad, wacky, slapsticky comedy about a couple of Chinese cops having knockabout adventures in New York’s Chinatown, written and directed by Chen Sicheng – a follow-up to his hit Detective Chinatown, which was set in Bangkok. Sicheng is a former actor who played a gay photographer drawn into an intense menage a trois in the grainy, gritty arthouse movie Spring Fever, from auteur Lou Ye, which won the screenplay prize at Cannes in 2009. A very different proposition.
Here, Haoran Liu plays a shy young Chinese officer who arrives in New York on a mission to solve a crime mystery that a number of detectives from around the world are also competing to solve. All sorts of goofy high-jinks ensue. Michael Pitt has an odd cameo as a doctor – which might constitute a red warning light flashing on his career dashboard.
