Author | Mia
Edit| Put the green
"I want this Lang Lang Qiankun to have a king's law in everything, and I want all the ways in this world to be under the blue world......"
The ending song of the movie "The Three Teams" "The Way of the World" is quite generous and tragic, and every word seems to be singing the protagonist Cheng Bing himself. The film is based on real events, originally published in "Netease Human Studio", and the original title is "Please tell the director, the task of the three teams is completed" (author Deep Blue). When the three major criminal investigation teams were solving a vicious case, the suspect died due to an accident, and the police officers were collectively imprisoned. After being released from prison, the captain Cheng Bing insisted on chasing the murderer for many years as an ordinary person, and finally arrested the murderer. This real event has a confrontation of law, reason, and emotion, with extreme characters and strong dramatic tension, and is a rare good story.
Compared with Douban's high score of 7.9 points, the box office fermentation of "The Three Teams" seems to be relatively slow: it was released for 6 days, and the box office exceeded 299 million. At present, Maoyan Professional Edition predicts a box office drop of 531 million, which is lower than a series of "crime suspense films produced by Chen Sicheng's team": also produced by him himself, directed by his young director, even if it is not compared with "Disappearing Her", it is still less than the 1.333 billion box office of "Manslaughter", and it is not as good as the 1.121 billion of "Manslaughter 2", which is also directed by Dai Mo. High word-of-mouth and box office hits, is it impossible to have both?
Shocking realism, anti-genre and anti-climax of unpretentious "reportage"
Douban opened with a score of 7.8 points, and it did not drop but rose to 7.9 points in a few days after its release, as a high-scoring domestic film for the year-end Chinese New Year, it is also the highest word-of-mouth work of Chen Sicheng's Yitong production in recent years, "The Three Teams" has the configuration of "Hurricane Trio", and the powerful lineup led by Zhang Yi.
Its behind-the-scenes team includes Zhang Ji, the screenwriter of "Dear" and "Chinese Partner", and Dong Jinsong ("Fireworks in the Day"), a literary and artistic photographer who often cooperates with Diao Yinan, and "The Last Night on Earth", which are the first cooperation with Chen Sicheng. The above-mentioned team is destined to make the film's temperament different from the past realistic and realistic, and realism has achieved its reputation, but it also makes its audience destined to be not so wide.
Its shock comes more from the character and his actions. Riding alone for thousands of miles, chasing the murderer for 12 years of stubbornness, giving an ordinary person the tragedy of a broken boat. Deep Blue wrote: "In the four years from 2009 to 2013, Cheng Bing explained to the community police where his household registration was located that the places where he worked were all in Hunan, Sichuan, Chongqing and Guizhou, and the types of work were also very varied: he worked in a night market, worked as a porter, a night taxi driver, a courier, and even worked as an Internet café security guard, a community doorman, and so on. ”
Compared with the original non-fiction literature, the film has undergone more artistic processing, removing the part of the victim's family petition, and turning the story of the archetypal character chasing the murderer alone into a story of a group of people chasing the murderer together - although they also left separately in the end, it brought warmth and brightness to the story, and also set the tone of the group portrait of the characters. This is also Chen Sicheng's comfort zone, judging from his past works, he is better at men's dramas than filming women.
And the most touching part of the film comes from the gathering and dispersion and brotherhood of the five police officers of the three major criminal investigation teams, the vicissitudes of the world in Baiyun Canggou, the criminal police of the year, after being released from prison, became a dog trainer, a seller of insurance, a seller of bracelets, and a night snack stall, they sang "Youth Ambition is not sorrowful", "Golden shield, cast with blood", the siren sounded when cleaning up the den, and the five walked side by side, the sense of impermanence of fate, the sense of reunion after a long absence, and the perseverance of love and righteousness, how similar to the dance in "Sunshine Sisters".
Although he also played the role of a policeman, this down-and-out policeman, compared with An Xin in "Hurricane" and Wei Guoping in "Who is He", has a great span in time, region, character mentality and situation, and the dramatic tension is very strong, which has more room for actor Zhang Yi to play. A short comment on Douban wrote: "Zhang Yi is absolutely amazing, let's put it this way, it is comparable to Wang Baoqiang's "Mr. Tree", and sure enough, the realistic theme is the touchstone for verifying the actor's acting skills." ”
And the regret of "no big explosion" seems to have been doomed from the beginning. Compared with "Manslaughter", which tells about class opposition and oppression, "Manslaughter 2", which directly hits the topic of medical treatment, and "She Who Disappeared", which tells about the fear of marriage and love, and the mutual assistance of women, "The Three Teams" does not have a strong topical reality projection, no infinite reversal of suspense and brain-burning, and does not directly hit the audience's emotional resonance release of happiness and hatred.
This is an almost anti-genre and anti-climax story, there are not many genre elements, there is almost no blood, coolness, and chicken soup in the whole film, but it is always suppressed and suppressed, and the protagonist's behavior has been repeatedly questioned and denied by everyone, including himself, until the moment when the murderer is finally arrested, there is no "cool" and "hi", "Now you don't need a confession to convict", giving them a heavy blow to the life changed by the confession, and the motives for persevering in revenge for the master are deconstructed one by one, with a sentence of "Report to the three teams, the task is completed" , becoming a medal that no one knows, Cheng Bing turned around and walked alone in the sunlight of the tree shadows on the street that he was not familiar with. This is a "sad song of the disappointed" who has lost almost everything in middle age and has been left behind by the times, and it is the epitome of countless ordinary people.
Compared with the excitement of the story level, the scheduling and shots are a bit regrettable. The audio-visual language is also documentary and very plain, and it can be more "good-looking" if you change the shooting method. On the whole, the film has received a lot of praise from fans and police groups by virtue of its authenticity, but it is difficult to sink and completely break the circle. In addition, the schedule selection is not good, the market is too cold, and the box office of "Aquaman 2" released today has also shrunk by 9 times.
In an interview with The Paper, screenwriter Zhang Ji said: "Sometimes I think, is it too flat? We often say that if you don't pick it up, you can't put it down?...... Sicheng is too, in the past, he played the genre to the fullest, and he also achieved great box office success, so this time he insisted on returning to the basics, even more extreme than I pursued. ”
Playing with commercial genre films was what Chen Sicheng was best at in the past, and this time, he chose to abandon the tricks after a long absence. The simplicity and restraint from beginning to end make "The Three Teams" completely different from other "films produced by Chen Sicheng's team", pointing to a differentiated realistic path for domestic crime suspense films. The film is also one of the few main films of Wanda Pictures this year.
Chen Sicheng's "Suspense Dream Factory" &"Young Director Matrix" appeared
Not long ago, a hot search once again aroused the curiosity of the outside world about the business territory of Chen Sicheng and his ex-wife Tong Liya. According to the information of the enterprise investigation, Yitong Xingcheng (Tianjin) Enterprise Management Partnership (Limited Partnership) has undergone industrial and commercial changes, and the shareholders have added Chen Shengqi (Chen Sicheng's father), Tong Liya, and Chen Baoyan, with shareholding ratios of 10%, 5%, and 3% respectively.
The company was established in October 2019, and the largest shareholder is Chen Sicheng (Chen Sicheng's real name), holding 80% of the shares. When the two divorced earlier, the two parties had no business territory intersecting. There is only one foreign investment of Yitong Xingcheng, which is Beijing Yitong Legendary Film and Television Culture Co., Ltd., holding 17.6% of the shares. This company is also the second producer of "The Three Teams" after Wanda Pictures.
And this company is also Chen Sicheng's "suspense dream factory". From "Tang Detective 1" to "Tang Detective 3", it has helped the deeply bound Wanda Pictures to achieve a turnaround in performance again and again. "Tang Detective 3" appeared for the first time with the name of a legend. It is worth mentioning that Yitong also invested in Wang Baoqiang's "In the Octagonal Cage", which is regarded as a continuation of the brotherhood between Xu Sanduo and Chengcai.
In the early years, the signed artists were Chen Sicheng, Tong Liya, Liu Haoran, and Dai Mo, and the deep binding between the latter two and Chen continues to this day. In terms of signed actors, "The Hidden Corner" Rong Zishan signed a contract with Yitong Productions in 2022. Wen Yongshan, who signed a contract in 2021, has been transformed from a model to an actress, and in her production of "Manslaughter 2", she left the country to play her mother without makeup, and the image of the "femme fatale" in the red dress in "Disappearing Her" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and she successfully ushered in the second spring of her career in the mainland.
After selling shares and leaving the market from Wanda Film and Television Holdings, relying on Yitong, which he founded, Chen has cultivated a series of young directors of suspense films in recent years, and his styles are different and changeable, and he has successfully met the market preferences many times, and even predicted the wind direction in advance ahead of the market again and again, remade many times, and created a number of hits. With the accurate judgment of public opinion and outstanding trading ability, he is regarded as "the most successful product manager in the film industry".
In recent years, he has increasingly appeared as a producer, supporting young directors, making it easy to control the completion of projects, and at the same time, he can also break the ceiling of personal production capacity and control costs, which is the embodiment of industrialized thinking. Chen Sicheng once said in an interview: "I will first ask him what kind of film he wants to make and who his favorite director is, if his list jumps out of artists like Apichatpong, then forget it; if he wants to make commercial films, his favorite directors are Spielberg, Nolan, Park Chan-wook, these are okay." Through the 2020 web drama "Detective Chinatown", he let the four rookie directors Ke Wenli, Dai Mo, Yao Wenyi and Lai Mukuan complete their practice and appearance, and expanded the IP universe of Tang Detective.
Dai Mo is Chen Sicheng's cousin, graduated from Chinese opera, and previously directed "The Name of the Rose" in the online drama "Detective Chinatown", as well as "Manslaughter 2" and "Three Teams". In addition, his directed works also include Liu Cixin's sci-fi IP "Ball Lightning" to be broadcast in 2024, which is another attempt in the field of science fiction after "Mozart in Outer Space", the producer of the above films and series is Chen Sicheng, and the screenwriter of "Ball Lightning" is also Chen Sicheng.
Malaysian director Ko Boon Li's short film "Free Man" was nominated for an Oscar for live-action short film. He directed the first unit of the "Tang Detective" web series "Mandala Dance" and "Manslaughter 1", and also directed the drama "Female Psychologist".
"Disappearing Her" is directed by young director Liu Xiang and Cui Rui, who has been in the United States for eight years, and the authorship and industrial nature of the two can just complement each other. In the Tencent Video film list, it was officially announced that Cui Rui will also direct "Chinatown Detective: Youth Detective Group".
In the end, with the joint cooperation of Chen Sicheng and young directors, what the market sees is a series of mature and different, insignificant personal styles, but with obvious "Chen's style": if the "Tang Detective 1-3" series tries to integrate "suspense + comedy" to maximize entertainment, but the third word-of-mouth collapse, which is a bit too much. The "Manslaughter" series strengthened suspenseful reasoning and integrated social issues, "Disappearing Her" was a great commercial success for the first time to integrate women's topics, but it ushered in controversies such as tricks, and "The Three Teams" challenged hardcore realist creation. Every time Chen Sicheng turns unexpectedly, he explores the different possibilities of the suspense genre, which is the embodiment of his commercial sense as the highest-grossing director in China.
Another "director support belt" has a similar idea, and the company that has a big hit this year is Bad Monkey. If the authorship of young directors of the bad monkey department in the past is more obvious, "abandoning a strong personal style" may be the inevitable development of their future industrialization. This year, Ning Hao's summer box office "All or Nothing", which was produced by Ning Hao and directed by the Olympic bid, seems to show that the bad monkey has also found the best fusion point of realism and public emotional resonance in the "mission film", and the label style is more distinct. In the future, for film companies founded by such directors, the trend of "matrix of young directors" will be more significant. Such companies usually have strong content creation genes, and the director is undoubtedly the core of the creation.
Can the commercial value and the content value of the film itself be compatible? "Yitong" may be suitable to answer this question. As Chen Sicheng said: "The first principle of making a movie is not to lose money." ”