4.5/5
Review by John P. Harvey.
Following their exploits in three previous Detective Chinatown movies, popular action-comedy duo Baoquiang Wang and Haoran Liu team up once again as a pair of unlikely detectives, this time playing respectively Gui, or Ghost — a Chinese immigrant raised by native Americans — and Qin Fu, fresh from an apprenticeship with the great Sherlock Holmes. Each one of them pursuing a murderer, they join forces when they find that the crimes are linked.
Realising that the chief suspect in both murders, Zhenbang Bai (Steven Zhang), is innocent, and with the pleas of his father, Xuanling Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), ringing in their ears, they set forth to take on one… or two… or maybe more murderers, with Gui’s own prowess in martial arts protecting and complementing Qin Fu’s medicine-trained powers of observation and deduction.
As is common in Chinese martial-arts movies, both action and dialogue can be explosive. In Detective Chinatown 1900, the frenetic pace of conversation — reflected in rapid turnover of sub-titles — between the two detectives fortunately finds balance and respite in the more stately speech and mannerisms of Bai Xuanling, which Chow Yun-Fat, veteran of many films of the most refined martial artistry, suits perfectly.
Detective Chinatown 1900 is a hit. Combining uncommonly bad luck, hilarious good luck, and clever martial-arts choreography, it manages to splice together the elements of a detective parody, a martial-arts adventure, a comedy, and a western in nonstop rollicking action whose delightful twists and turns will have you gasping and laughing in the same breath. And you won’t miss the relevance of the movie’s major social themes to today’s world.