Warning: Too Many Zooms
Has anyone seen Zhang Yimou lately?
Scare Out
Director: Zhang Yimou • Writer: Chen Liang, Zhang Yimou
Starring: Jackson Yee, Zhu Yilong, Song Jia, Lei Jiayin
China • 1hr 45mins
Opens Hong Kong February 28 • IIB
Grade: C+
Scare Out | 驚蟄無聲 is not a movie. Like Top Gun, it’s official messaging wrapped up in an “espionage thriller” that lacks the irony and homoerotic beach volleyball that made the former film tolerable. The wretchedly titled (at least in English) Scare Out was produced with and by the blessing of China’s Ministry of State Security and it’s become a solid Lunar New Year hit. Why not? Who doesn’t love a little spycraft for the holidays? But Scare Out is constructed almost entirely of rapid fire zoom shots of identically dressed and haircutted dudes between 28 and 36 in weird quasi-bomber jackets gazing out car windows trying to look like they’re contemplating the heavy issue of betraying their country, their job and themselves. That’s it, and that’s generous. Scare Out has more taxi cabs in it than may actually exist in Shenzhen where it was shot (at least in the shiny new parts).
The action (hahahaha) starts with some kind of security breach that gets the national intelligence services to launch into hunting mode to find the (obviously) white person who’s gotten their grubby little paws on some classified fighter jet specifications. This is allegedly based on a real security breach of a real jet. One sting in particular goes wrong and one of the crew is killed in the line, and it turns out that – clutch your pearls – the traitor is inside the house. Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern director Zhang Yimou has been replaced with this checked out Under the Light, Article 20 and Olympics ceremony doppelganger, who seems to have other plans he needs to get to. Scare Out is lazy and disconnected.
This guy’s job? No clue
Intelligence services management, led by director Wang (Zhang Yi, Blades of the Guardians) and Zhao Hong (Song Jia), assemble a team of agents to find the mole. The twin agents are Yan Di (Jackson Yee Yangqianxi, Resurrection) and Huang Kai (Zhu Yilong, Dongji Rescue), kinda sorta besties – obviously because they sit beside each other at work. Huang has a young wife who either doesn’t know what he does, or knows too much, but either way is upset he’s always at work. Their primary targets are whittled down to foreign actor and sex kitten (of course) Bai Fan (Yang Mi, The Lychee Road) and her asset, the sketchy scientist Li Nan (Lei Jiayin, A Writer's Odyssey 2, Zhang’s Article 20), who just wants to skip town with his family. Rest assured, there’s a white guy lurking in the shadows (not French, not American, not British… white, but with a solid command of Putonghua) but as the investigation drags on and Yan and Huang run in circles suspicion turns toward each other as well. Like the slew of Southeast Asian Hellhole thrillers of the last few years, there’s a twist, and then another, and another…
The truly bizarre part of Scare Out is just how much contempt the machinery of state seems to hold the general public. This is approved media, so it’s true, right? We’re supposed to marvel and ooh and aah over the advanced spyware that supposedly exists in reality, in its super cool capabilities and ultra-high speeds. But all it really suggests is that everyone is a suspect of everything, all the time. The visual trickery – doorcams, lobbycams, dashcams, subway cams, trackable phones – is ostensibly meant to give the film a futuristic, high tech language and aesthetic. All is does is make me paranoid.
Zhang seems to have thrown in the towel, last trying to make a film that said something in 2020 (One Second), and has settled comfortably into the steely grey techno-thriller phase of his career, pumping out green banner diversions and cashing a cheque. Admittely he comes right up to the line in Scare Out by making the traitor a Chinese national working for the system, but he doesn’t cross it. When all is said and done we have no idea why the bad guy broke bad – the endgame of any decent spy thriller. Was it for money? Was it to send a sick child to Switzerland for experimental medical care? Was it because the government abandoned their special ops squad members after a harrowing mission? Was it just to fuck around? Zhang and co-writer Chen Liang float an answer that’s the weakest of tea, and all it really does is make matters worse by copping out in the closing frames. The message is irrelevant when the messenger is so half-baked. Yee and Zhu do what they can with the limp material, but both were far more energetic and engaging for Bi Gan and Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang last year. As for Zhang… Surely one of his quilted jacked movies is streaming somewhere.