Detective Chinatown 3 review – majestically madcap buddy-cop whodunnit
Asian cinema’s wackiest buddy-comedy action franchise is now at the threequel stage and after a period of bewilderment I’ve begun to enjoy its eccentric hyperactivity. The two zany Chinese cops, Qin Feng (Haoran Liu) and Tang Ren (Baoqiang Wang), have already clocked up some misadventures in Bangkok for the first film and New York for the second (which featured a peculiar cameo from Michael Pitt); now the daffy duo rock up in Tokyo, where they have been summoned to tackle a bizarre crime.
A local gang boss has been murdered, apparently by a turf rival called Watanabe (Miura Tomokazu) over dinner, but this man insists he’s innocent and demands our heroes find the evidence that will acquit him. The rest of the film is one bonkers digression after another, concerning some strange criminal conspiracies and the shadowy motivations of the victim’s assistant Anna Kobayashi (Masami Nagasawa).
The Thai action star Tony Jaa makes an appearance for some enjoyable martial arts sequences, and there’s a small role for the veteran Japanese player Tadanobu Asano – who appeared in Takashi Miike’s cult shocker Ichi the Killer – as a police detective. You can’t fault this film for its ambition and its willingness to pull out all the stops in terms of spectacle, especially during a colossal slapstick fight scene at Tokyo airport and zany chaos at Tokyo’s world-famous Shibuya crossing.
Bizarrely, after all the knockabout absurdity, the movie climaxes with a melodramatic court scene involving a passionate speech and a sentimental flashback to the culprit’s unhappy childhood. We get a diverting moment when the “locked room” detective-story theories of mystery author John Dickson Carr are given an airing. There’s a puppyish charm here.
Detective Chinatown 3 is released in the UK on 24 January, and in Australia and the US on 25 January.
