Review | Detective Chinatown 2 film review: frenetic comedy sequel takes a wildly reductive picture of contemporary America
Chen Sicheng’s sequel about a bashful sleuth lured to New York milks cheap laughs from men dressing up, stealing a horse or dropping their trousers in an America full of gun-toting gang bangers, Trump lookalikes and closeted bikers
2/5 stars
As the epilogue of Chen Sicheng’s Detective Chinatown promised two years ago, the action moves from Bangkok to New York in this high-energy, lowbrow sequel, which has already proved a monster Lunar New Year hit in China.
Bashful sleuth Qin Feng (Liu Haoran) is lured to the Big Apple by his motormouth uncle Tang Ren (Wang Baoqiang) to help bag a US$5 million reward for solving the murder of a Chinatown kingpin’s grandson. The cash has attracted all manner of wannabe Sherlocks – including a smooth-talking detective (Satoshi Tsumabuki )and a teenaged Taiwanese computer hacker (Shang Yuxian) – any one of whom could be “Q”, the mysterious champion of a popular crime-fighting app.
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What follows is a frenetically paced fender bender, a cross-cultural sugar rush, as our mismatched heroes team up with Xiao Yang’s oddball suspect, and pinball around Manhattan using a combination of deductive reasoning, feng shui and blind luck to catch an organ-harvesting serial killer.
No opportunity is missed to milk a cheap laugh from men dressing up as nurses, or superheroes, stealing a horse or just dropping their trousers – all while Taylor Swift’s Welcome to New York is played on a seemingly endless loop. Liu’s resourceful introvert is repeatedly overshadowed by Wang’s excruciating bumpkin, who threatens – as he did first time out – to derail an otherwise slickly executed crime caper.
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The eclectic supporting cast includes Hong Kong veterans Yuen Wah and Kenneth Tsang Kong jostling for screen time alongside Michael Pitt as an oddball surgeon, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo ( Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny ) as the local detective tasked with wrangling the throng of amateur snoops.