Past Misdeeds: Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


China in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have earned the Empress a lot of enemies, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die - spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims' moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

Dee isn't exactly the biggest fan of the ruler himself, what with him having spent the last eight years in one of her prisons for acts of rebellion, but he still takes on the job she wants him to do. I suspect the man just loves to solve riddles.

With the help of the Empress's closest servant Shangguan Jing'er (Li Bing-Bing), whose job it is to keep the good Judge in line, and albinotic secret police man Pei Donglai (Deng Chao), Dee begins to investigate. Despite his fabulous knowledge of martial arts and his very big brain, Dee will need all the help he can get, because he'll not only have to thwart a secret conspiracy, but will also have to escape the metaphorical pitfalls of politics and morals, as well as various pointy and sharp objects various shadowy figures want to poke him with.

One (among only a very few) positive developments in Hong Kong based movie-making of the last few years has been the return of directors like Tsui Hark and John Woo to Hong Kong and China to make decent movies again. The way their careers in the US were going, Hark and Woo would probably have had to direct Steven Seagal movies next, so their return to making actual films with actual actors again is something to make an old fan like me pretty happy.

Not that Detective Dee's director Tsui Hark - whose return to his native grounds came quite a bit earlier than that of Woo - has made much of the comparatively better working environment in Hong Kong in the last few years. Before Dee Hark's best efforts of this century have been rather pedestrian, very much giving me the impression of being the products of a man who has too many technical chops to make truly abysmal films outside of Hollywood, but who has lost the inspiration and energy of his youth without finding a suitable replacement for these traits.

This first Detective Dee movie by Hark (at least a second one will soon follow) - based on a historical character who had been a hero of legends and novels in China and was later used in Western detective novels, too - is a big step in the right direction for the director.

The film is a martial arts fantasy mystery (so at least genre-wise quite a bit like Tsui's debut movie, The Butterfly Murders) that just barely (and with more than just one unspoken yet clear "but") manages the required, undignified kowtow to the imperialist ideals of contemporary China in its final five minutes, but is really more interested in the things many of the director's best films are interested in: flying people, weird fu, the grey areas where duty and personal feelings collide, a bit of gender-bending, and Andy Lau punching out attacking CGI-deer. Not unexpectedly, this is the sort of film that might take place in a precisely located historical era, yet that only cares about the actual morals, technology and feel of its era when it's convenient or interesting, which, if you ask me, is as it should be in a pulp adventure. Plus, this approach makes the addition of various steampunk elements possible.

As a Hong Kong pulp adventure movie, Detective Dee is a lot of fun. Once the narrative gets going, Tsui basically moves from one interesting and/or fun action set piece to the next, with only a few stops for characterization, moral deliberation, and detection in the mix. It's clear that the director knows what an audience wants from its pulpy adventure movies and is all too happy to provide it.

However, it has to be said that the choreography of the action scenes (by good old Sammo Hung, no less) isn't quite up to the highest standards of martial arts cinema. While the action is certainly professionally realized and exciting, there aren't many moments here that let one gasp with excitement or be startled by the film's beauty. The action - like Tsui's direction itself - tends a bit to the safe and professional where I'd have wished for the strange or ambitious. Of course, Detective Dee's type of "safe and professional" still beats many comparable Hollywood movies - as well as far too many Hong Kong films of the last decade - in this regard, even without breaking a sweat.

Acting-wise, the film is on just about the same level, though Andy Lau and Li Bing-Bing have no chemistry at all, which doesn't help the non-fighty bits of the movie much.


Clearly, when the worst thing I can say about a new film by Tsui Hark is that it's merely very good instead of great, I'm only complaining because the film's quality shows that the director still has a great film in him and not just a pretty great one, and just hasn't delivered quite what he's capable of here.