Mon 11 Nov 2019
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: PROJECT GUTENBERG (2018).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[4] Comments
PROJECT GUTENBERG. Hong Kong/China. 2018. Originally released as Mo Seung [“unique”]; in Chinese: ç„¡é›™. Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jingchu, Catherine Chow, Wenjuan Feng. Written and directed by Felix Chong.
Lee Man (Aaron Kwok) is an artist suspected of being involved with the legendary counterfeiter The Painter (Chow Yun-Fat) in jail in Thailand. Transferred to Hong Kong to help in the investigation of Inspector Ho (Catherine Chow) into the Painter, the nervous and timid artist recalls his tumultuous history with the master counterfeiter.
Told in a non-linear style, the film jumps back and forth showing how Lee failed in his career as an artist after going straight having started out as a counterfeiter, how he was estranged from his artist wife Yuen (Zhang Jingchu), and met the charismatic and brilliant Painter.
Playing brilliantly on audience expectations of Chow Yun-Fat’s past films, the Painter is handsome, brilliant, a one-man army, and as Lee soon discovers to his distress, a ruthless, violent, and volatile criminal with international ties and a plan to counterfeit American dollars that is unprecedented in its ambition.
Stylish set pieces, like a holdup of a special armored car carrying the inks used in printing dollars, shootouts in the style of John Woo, and an explosive gun battle with a greedy military leader wanting to buy the counterfeiting process Painter and Lee have created, punctuate the film, while the complex mix of characters and Chow Yun-Fat’s increasingly violent and inhuman behavior keep the viewer watching.
And if all was going on was a story about the young artist being seduced by and eventually turning against the older smoother criminal who turns out to hide a monster beneath the cool exterior and about the cops closing in on them, this would be a well done action crime drama.
But something more is going on with Project Gutenberg, and it becomes clear toward the end when almost everything you have seen before, an unreliable point of view character, and one shocking twist after another elevate this to something quite different than what you have been watching, or think you have been watching.
Aaron Kwok and Zhang Jingchu are attractive leads, but the film works because of the viewers’ expectations and knowledge of Chow Yun-Fat’s film history as the charismatic gangster hero with the magic guns and charmed life. The whole movie turns on the viewer’s expectation that this is a different movie than it actually turns out to be, and that is what makes it work.
It does drag a bit here and there, and some are going to hate the fact it has subtitles.
But while this is no Usual Suspects (might as well mention it, everyone is thinking it), it does take a fairly standard story of a young man seduced into crime by an older more charismatic figure who proves to have feet of clay, and turn it on its head at every point while providing thrills and spills and then ripping the rug out from under the viewer repeatedly until he is beaten into admiring submission.
Yes, unreliable point of view characters are kind of cheating, but only if the movie doesn’t deliver, and this one mostly does, right up to the shocking finale when the Painter gets his comeuppance.
I warn you though, you may kick yourself a bit for having been taken in emotionally as well as by the clever plot twists or hate the movie for leaving you rugless on a cold bare floor when the credits roll.
November 11th, 2019 at 9:16 pm
I can sometimes handle reading captions on the screen, but they do have to be large rather than tiny, and they had better not be white on light.
Question: Where does the English title come from?
November 12th, 2019 at 8:48 am
“…some are going to hate the fact it has subtitles.”
I would enjoy it less if it did not have subtitles since I do not speak either Chinese language.
November 12th, 2019 at 12:28 pm
Another option, of course, is dubbing, which some people favor over captions, but I’m not one of them.
November 12th, 2019 at 4:43 pm
Painter dubs his plan to literally print his own money Project Gutenberg for the presses he uses. One of the fascinations of the film is how much detail this goes into about the counterfeiting process — so much so that at the end of the movie there is a disclaimer to the effect that it is now impossible to successfully counterfeit American dollars because of the special strips and other coding included.
You really have to watch this film to keep up. There are people who have plastic surgery and thus the same face, emotional entanglements you thought you understood but didn’t, and characters you believe are central to the plot who get tossed away casually when the film turns out to be a different one that the film you think you were watching.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS turned on one major surprise involving an unreliable narrator, this one plays it so fast and loose that even when you think you have it figured out there is another half hour of surprises to come both in terms of what came before and emotional in nature.
This one is really worth catching, and I don’t think I gave the cat away to say the last forty five minutes are literally one twist on top of the other almost none of them anything you will have seen coming even knowing there are twists to come.
I’ll only say that the slow bits are more than made up for when the ball starts to roll, and vital to your understanding of the end.
If you are a Chow Yun-Fat fan it will be extra fun to watch how much the film depends on his screen persona much the way a similar film might use audience expectations of Cary Grant, James Stewart, or Clint Eastwood. That the film works is very much a tribute to his stardom, and gives him one of the best scenes of his career that he plays beautifully.