Director Diao Yinan made international waves a few years back with his noir Black Coal, Thin Ice and this is his follow-up. It’s hard to call this a noir however as it is mainly about police on a massive manhunt for a gangster. It does feature beautiful visuals and a great sense of atmosphere with its night scenes. But on all other counts it is a failure, with flat characters, a directionless plot and no real central theme of any kind.

Zhou Zenong is a member of a gang that operates in a city in southern China. During a meeting in which they distribute areas in which they are allowed to work in to steal motorcycles, his faction comes into conflict with a rival faction. He is wounded during an ambush and while trying to escape opens fire at some police officers, killing one of them. This provokes a massive manhunt on the part of the authorities and large numbers of police are deployed to search for him. While hiding out, he uses his contacts to get in touch with his estranged wife. His plan is to have her turn in him so that she can benefit from the reward money offered by the authorities. But the members of the rival gang are still searching for him and knowing that the police would not give a reward to known criminals, a prostitute, Liu Aiai, who is based at a lake that is a local tourist attraction, acts as a go-between.

Right from the opening shots, you can tell that this is the work of a director who really cares about cinematography. The night scenes are especially amazing with the carefully controlled spots of sodium lighting illuminating patches of darkness. The emphasis on gritty, worn and dirty environments in the form of cheap apartment blocks, potholed streets, chaotic street markets and so on marks this as being very different from the slick and clean image of the skyscrapers and highways of the top tier cities that China now prefers to show the outside world. The action choreography isn’t bad either and the pervasive use of a local dialect, which apparently is Wuhanese according to my search, makes this unintelligible to me without subtitles but adds to the local color. Just as the director’s previous film was about crime in the north of China, it’s clear that he means this to be about crime in the south. He gets the setting and visuals at least down perfectly.

The problem here is that the script, written by the director himself, is so very mediocre. I believe that this is at least partially due to working under the constraints of what is acceptable to be shown in China. The early scene focusing on the gangsters feels very dynamic and exciting, reminiscent of the old Hong Kong triad films, except that these are set in China of the present day. There is so much storytelling potential in inter-gang rivalries and Zhou being a gangster who is trying to do right by his people and his family. But once the police come into the picture, all this is thrown out and the film becomes dead and rote. The police is even lead by a captain who despite being played by the familiar Liao Fan, has no personality at all. Of course this being China, the gangsters can’t be seen as being cool or have any enviable qualities. The plot then devolves into a straightforward manhunt for Zhou while he himself wastes a lot of time trying to get himself turned in by the right person. The film doesn’t even have a good way of adding the character of Liu Aiai to the story and never tries to tell her story or the story of Zhou’s wife. This results in a film that never feels like it’s going anywhere and has nothing interesting to say beyond that all criminals eventually get their just desserts.

In the end, while it has some promise as a view into the seedy underside of China, it does too little with the concept and ultimately is too scared of offending the authorities. It is essentially a technically proficient film that has no story to tell. As my wife notes, it also feels oddly incongruous in its setting and many elements seem to have been included for nostalgia value but the usage of GPS theft-deterrent devices in the motorcycles suggests that it is meant to take place in the present day.