Director: Zhang Yimou
Writer: Liang Chen
Stars: Jackson Yee, Zhu Yilong, Song Jia
Synopsis: Vital intelligence leaked. The national security team vowed to find the traitor, but arrests failed repeatedly. As tension mounted, suspicion turned inward to the team itself. A silent battle unfolded amid trust and betrayal.
There may never be a better example of the sentence “when you find out your goat washed” than in watching Zhang Yimou’s Scare Out, a film whose questionable politics are the least of its problems, because every single aesthetic choice made by one of the most prolific Chinese filmmakers working today completely sinks this entire thing. It’s even baffling to wonder how the same guy who gave us the staggering works of art of Hero, House of the Flying Daggers, and Shadow could ever direct something this incompetent, where every attempt at dazzling the audience through a series of intricate stylistic flourishes goes catastrophically wrong.
Even Zhang’s most recent works, while imperfect, didn’t look (or feel) this sloppy. This is truly something to behold. One may even be tempted to watch this to see how such a great visual artist could stoop so low, especially a few years after the incredible Full River Red (which also starred Jackson Yee), but I’m here to tell you all to avoid it altogether. Zhang has rarely disappointed, and less so in the visual department (The Great Wall, while terrible, looks immaculate in IMAX 3D). This is a complete disaster right from the get-go, which attempts to blend the digital textures of Michael Mann’s Blackhat and Michael Bay’s Ambulance, alongside a galaxy-brained approach to Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State. Yet, none of its filmmaking inspirations feel earnest in any way, or as exciting as when Zhang meaningfully paints with his camera and crafts tableaux the likes of which you’ve likely never seen anywhere else.
This is a film where one single artistic choice – hyperactive editing – ruins everything. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but Scare Out is likely the worst-edited film I’ve ever seen, trumping Olivier Megaton’s TAK3N by a country mile. In fact, that film is smartly edited and looks coherent compared to this trainwreck. For reasons I can’t explain, which bear no meaning to the paranoia Zhang wants to instill in the story of two security officers (played by Jackson Yee and Zhu Yilong) who are suspected of being a mole after crucial intelligence leaks outside their purview, the movie is edited as if someone wanted to break the world record of most nonsensical cuts during a film.
Here’s an example: instead of cutting a typical foot chase in a relatively standard fashion, which would mean intercutting between the antagonist running away from the people chasing him, and the point of view of the protagonists, which would create a sense of rhythm within the action, Zhang cuts within the scene. This means that in the middle of a shot where the supposed good guys are running, he’ll cut to nowhere (he’s basically showing the same frame split twice), and often weirdly zoom into a given character, not with his camera, but with the digital tools of his editing software. This creates awkward, unnatural compositions that are always hampered by the most random cuts at any given occasion. It never allows the audience to sit with anyone or anything, because no one can actively discern what’s happening. The lyricism that defines Zhang’s work is completely gone.
Scare Out moves at a mile-a-minute pace without ever making the threat (or the “scaring out” of who the mole may be) urgent enough for the good guys to find the plant before more information is leaked. Only an inexplicable phone explosion, which comes out of left field, brought me the biggest laugh of any film I’ve seen this year so far. That must be seen to be believed, but should you trudge through at least an hour and a half before you get to this point? That’s debatable…
As far as the rest is concerned, Zhang can’t muster up interest in this thriller devoid of any dramatic tension and political intrigue. It almost feels like you’re watching an extended episode of an elongated soap opera, complete with ridiculous wigs, bludgeoning string-heavy music that tells the audience when a big moment is coming, and twists that make little sense as the movie progresses. Instead of homing in on one specific plot point, which is finding a mole who may be a part of a shadowy organization that could be much vaster than he thinks, Zhang adds several nonsensical reveals that turns this self-serious conspiracy picture into a pure farce, one whose last scene landed with such a thud its almost sold-out crowd laughed at how preposterous the whole thing was.
That’s also how I would describe the entire viewing experience of this profoundly perplexing motion picture by a once-great artist who has now fully become a mouthpiece for government propaganda. The signs were there in his post-Coming Home films, but they’ve reached their apotheosis inScare Out, a movie that has completely removed the modicum of artistic imprint that was left after Full River Red, as Zhang has now embarked on a “for-hire” era of painfully unremarkable pictures that the Western world will completely ignore, except this critic who longs for the return of his great masterworks. Maybe he’s got one more left in him, but today is not that day.
