"Crackdown": a work of confrontation between genre and localization

Author: Hao Han

"Crackdown" is a rare hardcore crime film on the screen in recent years, showing director Liu Haoliang's consistent preference for crime action genre films. The film has various characteristics of Hong Kong's classic crime films, such as the narrative of the two males, landscaped action scenes, comic-like characters, etc. However, at the artistic level, it failed to replicate the myth of the golden age of Hong Kong crime films, and even exposed the weakness of this model while reproducing the classic elements of Hong Kong films. In essence, this is the core proposition of deliberating on the cross-regional production of Hong Kong films, "Orange sheng Huainan is orange, and tangerine is huaibei is orange", and it is also an important criterion for the success of Hong Kong directors' co-production in the north, that is, whether the so-called genre indicators can fit the current film culture and commercial context.

Strictly speaking, "Riot Crackdown" is a police film. As a subtype of crime films, police films are arguably one of the most localized genres in Hong Kong. In the 1980s, represented by Jackie Chan's "Police Story" series and Wu Yusen's "Hero's True Colors" series, the development of crime films entered a peak period. Wu Yusen once created the classic "double male narrative" mode of police gangster films in the film "Blood Double Males", and in "Crackdown", the director adopted a completely consistent camera position and composition, and cross-edited the pictures of police zhong cheng and gangster Zhang Falcon watching "Blood Double Males" in the same video hall in the form of parallel montage. This intertextual treatment not only identifies the narrative mode of "Two Heroes of Blood", but also identifies the glory of the Hong Kong crime film it represents. However, it can be found that the director uses this technique to confuse the boundaries between the police and bandits, emphasizing the common characteristics of the two, in order to complete the narrative intention, but it seems to play only a slight role in the shadow. The so-called "double male drama" aims to create a positive and negative/police and bandit dualistic character who feels sorry for each other, is also an enemy and a friend, and is also a good and evil. However, in the current context, the portrayal of villains cannot rise to the psychological level, whether it is image or narrative, the tragic portrayal of negative characters is still restrained or even rejected.

In the film, Zhang Falcon has a very interesting dialogue with his mistress. After Zhang Falcon learned that the woman was pregnant, he named the future child "Zhang Xiao", which means a generation of tyrants. Borrowing Zhang Falcon's mouth, the director seems to tell his expectations for character shaping, which is exactly what the double male model requires, but this detail becomes an embarrassing footnote to tear the film apart. Zhang Falcon can never be portrayed as a "tyrant", and the audience can only perceive an innate antisocial personality through the unexplained and uncontrolled killing of the "Eagle Gang" represented by Zhang Falcon. In other words, the director only creates the external image of the gangster who suffers from violent crime, and cannot portray or deliberately avoid the inner image of this character, including the psychological or social roots of the tragic formation of personality. This also directly leads to the audience's difficulty in resonating and sympathizing with it, even at the end of the film, bao Qijing's gangster mother appears briefly, showing the appearance of the original family. Although Bao Qijing dedicated the most moving performance moments in the whole film, he could not save Zhang Falcon's collapsed character image. The ambiguous mother-child relationship does not explain anything, and the absence of Zhang Falcon's father seems to point to the source of personality tragedy. But this speculation cannot be confirmed, and even if it is, it seems too general, superficial and naïve.

In stark contrast is the other end of the mirror, criminal police officer Zhong Cheng. Zhong Cheng is also not shaped in the traditional way of so-called good and evil, or we can only see his tall and complete side. Whether it is zhong cheng as a pre-war mobilization before the arrest, or tearing up the small advertisement section covering the propaganda poster of the police station with a small colleague who was injured in the line of duty, it shows the main theme of the Hong Kong director. But as I just said, the inappropriate expression to a certain extent tore apart the overall style of the film, that is, the director's "orange life Huaibei for the orange".

In addition, the action scenes of "Riot Elimination" also carry the classic characteristics of Hong Kong crime films, which are highly formalized and landscaped. The film's action scenes are dominated by gunfights, following the pyrotechnic effects of typical Hong Kong-style action movies, and various exaggerated heavy weapons, such as automatic rifles, submachine guns, grenades, etc., are used in an almost unlimited amount, directly replacing the city streets with small war scenes. For the crime link, a series of dramatic treatments were also carried out, such as provocations to the police before and after the event. But all this is undoubtedly a fatal destruction of its style for a film with a realistic background. The director wants to retain the genre treatment that Hong Kong crime films are good at, and also wants to complete the expression of mainstream ideology with realistic themes.

In general, whether it is action scenes, character shaping or narrative mode, the idea of paying tribute to the classics and learning from the ancestors is true, but the social and cultural backgrounds on which the classics rely are already very different. Although the film's art and setting are quite remarkable, most of what is seen at the image level is the narrowness and violation of a director who has just "gone north" and has just arrived. To some extent, choosing a specific way to bridge is the only way for Hong Kong directors, especially commercial film directors, to produce across regions. Previously, Chen Kexin, Lin Chaoxian and others have made active explorations on this issue, and related works can be used as references.

(The author is a 2020 doctoral student of the Directing Department of Beijing Film Academy)

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel