Donor Fatigue
By the time this is over you’ll wish someone had taken your eyeballs.
Organ Child
Director: Chieh Shueh-bin • Writers: Huang Chih-hsiang, Chang Chih-sheng, Huang Ji-fan, Huang Shin-gau, Chieh Shueh-bin
Starring: Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan, Moon Lee Yu-tung, Shou Lou, Jag Huang Jian-wei, Jauder Yin Chao-te
Taiwan • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong June 19 • IIB
Grade: C-
Alright, hold on to your shorts, because this movie makes no sense and I’m having a legit hard time remembering how all the stupid details fit together – or don’t, as the case may be. Let’s start with Zhang Chi-mao (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan, Fantasy•World), a good-natured, ultra-caring little league baseball coach, who for reasons, finds out some dude – a priest, another coach, a parent, can’t recall, don’t care – is diddling some of the boys on his team. He finds out because one of the boys accidentally (?) kills the guy and coach Mao shoos them away from the crime scene and covers it up. I think. But we actually meet Mao in what’s probably a stinky basement somewhere torturing a random bizniz guy for information about the cabal of corrupt cops and doctors who stole his infant daughter nearly 20 years before – and framed him for a related crime. This even though there was never a body to recover because the baby was trafficked for her organs. Dun dun dun!
Thus begins Chieh Shueh-bin’s utterly ridiculous Organ Child | 器子 (jezuz that title), a noirish revenge thriller told in four chapters and dressed up as an “issues movie” with zero basis in the human and organ trafficking world and predicated on a series of bananas twists and turns that will have you looking at the back of your head from the inside. That’s how hard my eyes rolled, anyway. This is yet another actioner that looks great on the surface, is polished and well produced and has a cool enough if lunatic premise to work from. There have been dumber ideas so the “Where did my baby’s liver go?” isn’t really the problem. The problem is the garbage execution.
Buddy’s looking for a real script
About the only thing that Organ Child gets right is the visual aesthetic, mostly thanks to the work of cinematographer Ahoj Chao Wei-chieh. Chao really lays into the garish, the grimy and the bloody for Mao’s revenge campaign, and for most of the film makes the dark, oppressive vibe work. Thing is, we get constant reminders the rest of the movie is, unfortunately, still there and we are repeatedly subjected to its wildly pingponging tone and janky performances – probably due in large part to some painfully underwritten characters who never land on a personality. Leading those is discount Simon Yam Chang, who looks the part of a righteously furious dad but can’t quite pull off the loving papa part, though in fairness half of what he does is there to set up a twist down the road, logical or otherwise.
But let’s back up. Mao gets out of prison for the baby kidnapping and immediately breaks parole by tracking down and torturing (in full squishy colour) the various players in the conspiracy. They include the nurse who stole his kid, a broker of some sort, the ultra-rich father (Jauder Yin Chao-te) of a bland AF, privileged teenaged girl with a bum ticker, Qiao (Moon Lee Yu-tung, My Best Friend’s Breakfast, proving her acting skills are limited), and rotten cop Cheng Jing-dong (Jag Huang Jian-wei), who made sure Mao went away. Qiao probably got Mao’s baby’s heart, so she winds up in his crosshairs, but if you think that’s all there is to it, think again. Five writers – Huang Chih-hsiang, Chang Chih-sheng, Huang Ji-fan, Huang Shin-gau and Chieh – pile on the layers and eventually bury any semblance of a story under the mire and steer far, far, far away from any kind of examination of the very real scourge of human trafficking.
Organ Child left me with so many questions. Once the film starts unravelling the mystery and “explaining” the secrets and lies, it collapses house of cards. It makes Mao’s actions meaningless. It makes Qiao’s vanishing self-interest false. It makes you wonder just what the hell goes on in little league baseball. Director Chieh is best known for his equally ridiculous and pedestrian rom-coms, chiefly Do You Love Me as I Love You (and the gawdawful supernatural crime thriller Ping Pong from 2017), and he’s outmatched by the material here; it feels outside his comfort zone in the worst way. The film’s one scene with even a whiff of emotional heft comes at the very end, a barely earned resolution that works mostly because Chang takes it down a few notches, Lee doesn’t talk that much and Chao makes the most of the sunny location. If Organ Child were just a little shittier on the technical front it could be a great bad movie. As it stands it’s just middling junk that can’t find an identity or a purpose. I’ve forgotten it again.