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After experiencing the storms such as changing directors and postponing the epidemic, "Manslaughter 2" was finally able to meet the audience on the big screen, but the doubts along with the film were also endless. The reason is simple, "Manslaughter 2" tells a new story, and the relationship with the "manslaughter movie universe", perhaps only similar cast and film creative team.
What can be seen is that whether from the story or the movie publicity, with the "old bottle" of the first part of the "new wine", "Manslaughter 2" is doomed to escape the harsh judgment and the shadow of the previous work. Perhaps it is precisely because of the lowering of expectations that the film work itself can be viewed objectively. "Manslaughter 2" embellishes "new wine" with "new ideas", but these "old problems" are still inevitable.
Why "manslaughter"?
The first level of "Manslaughter 2" that was questioned was "Why is it still called "Manslaughter"" . The name of "Manslaughter 1" comes from the original "Manslaughter", so how does the second part, which tells a new story, establish a connection with the conflict point of "manslaughter" and even the reputation and influence of the "manslaughter movie universe"?
After watching "Manslaughter 2", you can find that the verb "manslaughter", or the fact of the crime itself, is no longer the "MacGuffin" of the entire movie. In the first part, Pingping's manslaughter of Shibao's Sucha in the process of rebellion is the cause of all subsequent revenge and blackmail operations.
However, in "Manslaughter 2", Xiao Yang's son Xiao Worm, played by Xiao Yang, is "stealing his heart" based on the premeditated premise of power oppression, and Lin Rilang's revenge against Satin (and the mayor behind him) and his party is also based on the intertextuality with the crime novel. At the end of the film, Satin orders the sniper to forcibly execute Lin Zhilang, which is actually in the plan of the frustrated point film screenwriter. In this game, there is only "killing", not "mistakes".
So how exactly is the plot of "manslaughter" embodied in "Manslaughter 2"? The interpretation given by the film's creator in the post-screening talk is that "the definition of a person is also a kind of 'manslaughter'".
"Manslaughter" is not only a physiological claim to a person's life because of a mistake or mistake or misunderstanding, but also the other in society, declaring the social death of another individual because of a subjective meaning (or profit-driven) "misunderstanding" or "misreading".
So at this level, it can be said that Lin Zhilang was "accidentally killed" twice in this film, once from the oppression of the powerful, and once from the public's denial.
Therefore, the name of "Manslaughter 2" not only comes from the inheritance of the corresponding IP, but also guides the audience to produce a new, or more diversified interpretation of "manslaughter" in the process of watching the movie, after all, people are social animals. And these critical meanings can reflect the second narrative thread in the film - the voice of the public.
After the implementation of Lin Zhilang's revenge crime performance, the "field" of storytelling in the whole film has been reduced a lot, and there are only two story scenes: in the hospital where the hijacking took place, there was a large number of public onlooks outside the hospital. If you reduce these two scenes to scenes that everyone will be familiar with, it is "stage" and "audience seat".
The emergency hall of the hospital is the stage for Lin Zhilang to perform torture and power and make a sound, and the hospital inpatient department where Lin Zhilang's wife and children are located is the "backstage" that provides new motivation and support for this performance, and the crowd outside the hospital, and everyone behind the media terminal, is the audience of this performance.
However, unlike the closed two-way information transmission in traditional dramas or film stages, the stage presented in "Manslaughter 2" is an open "panoramic prison". While watching Lin Rilang, the audience inside and outside the play has already tried Lin Rilang again and again.
From being stamped "Good Daddy" and "Good Man" when the pregnant hostage was first released, to being spurned as a "murderer" after "killing" the police, "we helped him speak before", to the fact that after the truth came out, everyone was collectively silent, and the public opinion was repeatedly reversed, just like the "reverse news" that is staged every day in reality off-screen.
The depiction and torture of the "ragtag crowd" is not new in film and television works, but "Manslaughter 2" extends the physiological death of the previous work to the proposition of "social death", expands the concept of "manslaughter", and makes the film's publicity and production ideas more convincing.
And return to the work itself, help the narrative to expand the multi-dimensional, deep-seated emotions such as fairness, justice, morality and other multi-dimensional and deep-seated discussions, which is actually a "new idea".
So, instead of a new story, no longer a physical or physiological "manslaughter", the expression of "Manslaughter 2" is still convincing and enough to rush out of the screen, so that the "judges" off-screen are also involved - and the "check his movie record" in the first part is similar.
A simple screen "turtle soup"
Objectively speaking, the suspense shaping level of "Manslaughter 2" is lower than that of the previous work, but in addition to suspense, "Manslaughter 2" has come out of a new "storytelling" road. Unlike the cyclical structure of the previous game, from foreshadowing to decryption to regression, The beginning of Manslaughter 2 uses a very popular reasoning game mode - "Turtle Soup".
"Turtle Soup" is a situational reasoning guessing game in which the author proposes an incomprehensible, illogical event, and the participant can ask any question to try to narrow down and find out the real reason behind the event, but the questioner can only answer the question with "yes (right)", "not (wrong)" or "no relationship".
The opening scene of "Manslaughter 2" is not paved, and the knife is raised, but Lin Rilang's seemingly "perfect" crime shows illogical places everywhere - why not rob the bank but hijack the hospital? Why not just "one heart" for money? Why don't you want to see the police, but you have to see a reporter? These perverse question marks connect some of the hints of close-up shots, causing the viewer to involuntarily ask similar questions, while the film camera then answers them with "yes" or "no" for the audience.
Another suspenseful element appears in the middle of the film, which is the reversal of the identity of the real murderer behind the robbery of the heart. In fact, the identity reversal is not surprising, even when Sardin appeared, experienced suspense film audiences already knew that "must be reversed", the highlight of this paragraph is that Lin Zhilang successfully created a horror atmosphere through "death fraud", threats and other methods, increasing the audience's expectations for the "reversal" itself. Looking at the layout of the suspenseful conflict points of the whole movie, it can be said that it is very neat, very in line with the trinity of drama, but lack of surprises.
From "Story-based" to "Performance-Based"
The success of "Manslaughter 1" is also greatly attributed to the blueprint of the original work, although the story told is different, but "Manslaughter 2" is still a remake of the film, the original version is also the "pain of heartache" in the 2002 niche American crime film "Imminent", but at the same time, you can also see the shadow of a number of realistic movies.
Xiao Yang once said in "Manslaughter 1": "When you have watched a thousand movies, you will feel that there is nothing bizarre in this world." This sentence also applies to this film. I don't know if Lin Richang's screenwriter identity is a kind of self-deprecation based on black humor, but it is obvious that after the suspense color is weakened, the emotional hedge in the film is particularly intense, and the most obvious is reflected in the impeccable performance of the actors.
Lin Rilang, played by Xiao Yang, can easily switch freely between the love as a father, the pain of the unfortunate, the madness as the perpetrator, the despair when he is the exposer, and the caution and decadence when he is an "honest man".
The doctor Dama played by Song Yang can also have multiple forms such as the coldness of the elite, the helpless decadence in the face of human suffering, and the incompetent anger in the face of the oppression of the powerful.
The sheriff Zhang Zhengyi, played by Ren Dahua, is even more unique, and at the same time, with another sleek, extroverted father image, in contrast to the introverted Lin Rilang. It can be said that whether it is an indictment of the hedging of reason, jurisprudence, morality and justice, or dissatisfaction with some social phenomena, lamentations of misfortune, and praise of fatherly love and family responsibility, the emotional tension presented in "Manslaughter 2" is far greater than the suspense and drama.
But behind the superb performance, it is still unavoidable that the regret of the lack of storytelling is still unavoidable. Good original scripts, especially intellectually intensive scripts such as suspense, are encounterable and unattainable, and this must be faced squarely. Therefore, on this basis, the remake is a flattering way of expression, and throughout the history of artistic creation, the remake is not evidence of "lack of imagination" or "worthless".
For example, the Russian literary giant Chekhov's play "Cherry Orchard" is also the blueprint for many modern dramas, the classic plays of Shakespeare, Strindberg, Ibsen are still the main source of NTL masterpieces; Martin Scorsese's remake of China's "Infernal Affairs" birth of the film "Infernal Walker" also won the 79th Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Film and other 4 awards. It can be said that what human beings love to see is nothing more than love and hate, using new techniques or the spirit of the times to make the classic blueprint glow with new vitality, but it will produce 1+1>2 effect.
So, "remake" is not original sin. The success of "Manslaughter 1" proves that the audience does not contradict the localization of excellent, logical and self-consistent and unique remakes. Therefore, improving the persuasiveness and logic of the story, with the idea of "showing, not telling", and letting the audience naturally enter the situation of the story, is the hard power that a good script should have. Performance, audio-visual, although it is also important enough, but when you encounter a good story itself, you will add the icing on the cake.
Therefore, although "Manslaughter 2", which tells a "new" story, does not reach the height of surprise or shock, it is enough to have the elements that a midstream and upstream domestic suspense film should have, and even better than most similar works in terms of performance and expression. Since the shadow of the previous game cannot be avoided, let's find another way to transform the "pain point" into a "selling point".
There are many opinions outside the screen, just as Lin Rilang also has extremely polarized and complex evaluations in the "melon-eating masses", "Manslaughter 2" will surely print a tentative footprint of domestic suspense IP generalization in complex word-of-mouth and discussion.