I remember that on the 30th anniversary of the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2011, the emcee on stage asked the audience: "How many colleagues have struggled for Hong Kong films for thirty years?" Please raise your hand. The densely packed arms were raised, and even the three emcees on the stage, Mao Shunjun, Gu Dezhao, and Zheng Danrui, were raised. This scene is an incomparable emotion for our generation of audiences who have been influenced by Hong Kong movies since childhood and baptized by the spirit of Hong Kong entertainment since childhood. Because that golden age has passed, Hong Kong movies are no longer the era of new people, and the back wave pushes the front wave. The old faces who grew up and saw big are still the backbone of the banner of Hong Kong cinema. How many thirty years of life?
Watching "The Great Hunt", there will also be some sighs. Zhang Jiahui and Ren Dahua are representatives of the glory of Hong Kong films along the way, from the dragon runner to the Academy Awards film emperor. They are not young, but they are still working hard, maintaining the creative enthusiasm and physical state that young people can not reach. In particular, Zhang Jiahui, in order to play a dangerous character in this film, has carried out devil training, and he has lost one-third of his weight for fitness and weight loss. Such a fight, fans seem, but there is a bit of heartache. Otherwise, what to do, Hong Kong's younger action stars, it seems that except for a few such as Nicholas Tse, are really weak. And Zhang Jiahui's boyhood in the film can only be played by Dou Xiao, a new face in the mainland.
However, watching this film can still smell a young vitality, feel another kind of hope and joy. In detail, it is a valuable attempt by the young creative group of director Zhou Xianyang and screenwriter Du Zhilang to adapt to the new era and the new film market environment. The film not only retains some elements of traditional Hong Kong films, but also has a different flavor, adding humanized suspense and reasoning, and exploring another possibility of Hong Kong-style police and gangster genre films.
Hong Kong police films have their own consistent creative advantages, Wu Yusen, Du Qifeng, Liu Weiqiang, Lin Lingdong, Lin Chaoxian, etc., have developed their own different aesthetic styles. Like "Reverse War", the scene is hot all the way, and the cinema is deafening. In the film "The Great Hunt", the young director developed a set of dark and deep cold violence, using the tension of the plot to replace the hot violence of gunfire. Of course, there is no shortage of exciting scenes in the movie, such as the fight in prison at the beginning, the destruction of corpses in the moonlight, and the rape and murder of a young girl twenty years ago. It is obvious that the director's interests and hobbies are biased towards cult films, but in order to adapt to the scale of mainland censorship, there is some restraint. When performing such scenes, on the one hand, it is emphasized by the light of the lens, etc., and on the other hand, it also mobilizes the side rendering and psychological hints to stimulate various associations of the audience.
Rather than the crime itself, the film pays more attention to the excavation and portrayal of the characters' motives. Among the three main men, Wang Yuanyang, played by Zhang Jiahui, is an extremely serious offender, looks very dangerous, threatens the heroine step by step, and kills people in the moonlight, but this is not enough to shock the audience, but what shocks the audience even more is why he did this, his fate, his grievances and his injustice; the musician Xu Hanlin looks like a strict father, the discipline of his daughter is different from ordinary people, his atrocities in costume and beasts are heinous, but what is more touching is the inhuman feelings for his adopted daughter behind his atrocities And the police officer played by Ren Dahua has long laid an emotional line for him and his daughter before the investigation of the case.
For this mystery movie, the mystery is important, but the human contradiction behind the mystery is more interesting. When the audience thinks it's all about revenge, the movie tells you it's not, it's all because of love. The three male protagonists are all like this, but some are wrong loves. Love is colder than death, more powerful than revenge, and the writer and director tell you that love is a deeper human motivation than revenge and death. In the film, Wang Yuanyang said, "How much I want to watch my daughter grow up slowly", which is sad.