Rent Let the Bullets Fly (2010)

Frantic antics with a Marxist message - Let the Bullets Fly review by Count Otto Black

Firstly, ignore the synopsis - it was obviously written by somebody who hadn't seen the film.

Moving on to the film itself, it's basically a homage to the classic spaghetti westerns (there's a direct quote from "A Fistful Of Dollars" very early on), including the lesser-known comedic ones. Unfortunately there's one huge problem for non-Chinese audiences, and that's the comedy. The Far East has many cultural differences from the Near West, one of them being the style of humor that is traditionally accepted as being funny. The ridiculous level of overacting would in our culture be amusing to fairly young children but just plain embarrassing for adults, and although I may be missing subtle jokes that were lost in translation, the constant face-pulling, bursting into tears, and sub-moronic idiocy displayed by the supporting cast suggests otherwise.

Chow Yun Fat, an overrated actor whose reputation has more to do with the films he's been in than how good he really is, gives his default performance, suitably dumbed down and camped up, and is out-acted by costar Jiang Wen (who is also the director). The action scenes are nowhere near as numerous or as exciting as you might expect - the "epic" final battle consists mainly of lots of extras with guns running offscreen and presumably defeating several hundred baddies we hear about but never actually see - and are frequently compromised by crude, repetitive humor that jarringly shifts into drama we're supposed to care about with no transition at all. This applies throughout the film; one scene in particular (the one involving jelly) left me utterly baffled as to whether it was meant to be funny or tragic, and just came across as grotesque in the worst possible way.

As for the "everybody pretends to be everybody else" plot, I was both losing track and losing interest by the 10th or 12th time this happened. And the "capitalism is very, very wrong" message isn't a subtext, but a thuddingly clunky bit of propaganda so blunt that the hero seems to be overwhelmed by an obsessive-compulsive desire to redistribute wealth not unlike that of the Monty Python highwayman who steals lupins, while failing to do obvious things to the point where it has to be lampshaded by having other characters point this out (and getting a Marxist homily for their trouble).

If you want to see a recent genuinely action-packed pseudo-spaghetti western from this part of the world which sometimes gets a bit silly, watch "The Good, The Bad, And The Weird", which beats this film on every count other than not being quite as pretty. And if you want to see a movie of this type with Marxist underpinnings done properly, watch "A Bullet For The General", or quite a few other spaghetti westerns from the sixties and seventies, including most of Sergio Corbucci's output. But give this a miss.