#my wife being tiancheng.

[kyannnite]

i miss my wife tails….

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Blizzard (2018)

If you’re interested in The Blizzard and your local theater happens to be showing it, I hope your experience is better than mine. The subtitles I read were filled with typos and errors. “I was stabbed in the pain”? I think they met “in the back”. Not helping is the moldy old plot and large number of unnecessary characters. I struggled to stay awake until the film’s bananas of an ending.

Liu Haiyang (Kai Tan), Song Chao (Yuan Nie) and Huang Tiancheng (Gaowei Qu) were best friends at the police academy until Liu witnessed Song murder his father. Since, he’s become obsessed with revenge. Following a lead, Liu becomes embroiled in a conspiracy; a mysterious woman at the head of a crime syndicate is searching for a flash drive and will stop at nothing to get it.

Finding information about this film has been arduous but I’ll be damned if my time will go to waste. I’ve already mentioned the poor subtitles. In a thriller with this many characters – Liu’s nephew, his nephew’s girlfriend, his wife and father, the evil boss lady, a selection of her minions all have prominent roles – this flaw would be catastrophic. Fortunately, every character is so flat and the story so familiar you can follow the general storyline without grasping the details. Once twists come to light, your reaction is always “oh, of course”. The fight scenes aren’t particularly well choreographed either. Some of them look pretty good but often it’s obvious the extras are off-screen waiting for their cue to jump in and fight our hero.

Let’s be honest, you’re not going to see this film, so let’s dig in. The big reveal – surprise surprise – is that Song Chao did NOT kill Liu’s father, that it was all a misunderstanding. He walks in on the old man being assaulted by minions 1, 2 & 3. After a scuffle, minion 1 gets shot in the crotch (“My balls!” He screams) while #2 is mortally wounded and the third helps the others get away while daddy bleeds to death. At this moment Liu walks in. Had he spotted the trail of blood leading away from the scene, all of the confusion could’ve been avoided. Even so, it wouldn’t save the film from its ending. The boss lady who’s been overseeing the framing of police officers and murders and kidnappings, she keeps acting strangely. At one point, she asks one of her cronies to touch her breast. “Does it excite you?” she asks. Kinda weird. Her question makes sense when boss lady’s true identity is revealed… as the bad guy who was castrated by a bullet all those years ago! Huh? What? Why? Shut up. The movie’s almost over and if you don’t raise your hand, maybe it’ll end faster.

The longer The Blizzard lasted, the harder it became for me to stay awake. There’s nothing interesting happening here and those responsible for this film’s distribution seem aware of this, as they’ve put the minimum of effort into making it accessible. I’d tell you to skip the movie, but I doubt you’d be able to get a ticket even if you tried. (Original Mandarin with English subtitles on the big screen, September 25, 2018)