Manila to Shanghai
29 May 2005
11:27 am
Our Airbus has been in the air for a little less than 20 minutes. 3 more hours worth of watching cloud forms crawl by before we land at Pudong Airport in Shanghai City. (The in-flight movie is Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera, so apart from writing this entry there isn’t really much going on for me right now.)
Did a bit of research last night, hitting the obvious travel sites like www.lonelyplanet.com and Gawker Media’s www.gridskipper.com. Shanghai sounds a lot like Makati City from the various descriptions I’ve come across — high-tech commerce-centric locale with little in the way of cultural attractions, the sort-of urban travel destination that tend to bring out the geek in me. I suppose it’ll be a lot like Singapore, except that the English-speaking population will be A LOT less than Singapore’s quoted 90%.
Some of the must-visits include Nanjing Road, The Bund and Yunnan Road, all three of which involve either shopping, food or both. The Bund in particular sounds like Shanghai’s version of Singapore’s Orchard Road, which has first-class malls and hotels side-by-side for its entire length.
12:22 pm
Watching Emmy Rossum gasp and titter her way through Phantom without my headphones reminded me that I saw Jet Li’s Unleashed (released as "Danny the Dog" in most other countries) last night.
If you’ve seen the trailer to Unleashed you’ll probably already know the basic plot, i.e., Jet Li plays an enforcer who kills for his small-time gangster boss (played by Bob Hoskins). Removing Danny’s collar sends him into a killing frenzy, so you have to keep his collar on if you want to control him, hence the "dog" reference.
As you can imagine, the concept is extremely limiting, as the only plot you can play out with a character that one-dimensional is the "self-discovery" story, wherein Danny recognizes that he is more than just a killing machine. This is exactly what happens of course, and the entire second act is devoted to Danny bunking in with a blind piano tuner played by Morgan Freeman.
Unfortunately, Luc Besson’s take on Danny’s spiritual journey is painful to watch and a real chore to sit through. There are stupid, shallow scenes where Danny learns to shop for fruit, eat vanilla ice cream or play a few notes on the piano, all of which are about as humanizing as teaching your dog to fetch you the newspaper in the morning. It’s all so boring in fact that they had to slip in a thread involving a mixed-martial-arts-type tournament that Danny is forced to enter, just to wake the audience up. The tournament ends up being totally irrelevant to the plot, as is the final battle between Danny and some random dude in a gi.
I’m not entirely sure why Besson insists on infusing his scripts with these silly attempts at depth (the last film I saw from him, The Fifth Element, had similar problems). Whatever the reason, his work always seems half-baked and under-developed, and Unleashed is no exception.
About the only thing this movie has going for it is the brutish fight choreography by Yuen Wu Ping; there’s a really good bit toward the end between Jet Li and the random gi guy in a tiny bathroom cubicle. It’s a shame because the fight sequences seem more like after-thoughts, when they should really be the centerpiece of this film. The "dog" concept is too simple to be much more than that, and Besson’s attempt at a digression on independent-thought is just forcing this movie into a mold that it wasn’t built to fill.