‘Detective Chinatown 1900’ Review: Chow Yun-Fat & John Cusack Join Blockbuster Franchise In Whodunnit Romp With A Cultural Message
Mainland China stars Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran reunite for a fourth round of high-stakes snooping in Detective Chinatown 1900. The twist this time is that they are playing ancestral versions of the characters they have portrayed in three previous blockbuster installments. Switching the action from contemporary diaspora districts to turn-of-the-century San Francisco, the film throws the duo together to investigate a double murder that could trigger an all-out nationwide race war.
Chief among the big names joining our intrepid sleuths are Hong Kong legend Chow Yun-fat, as Chinatown’s unofficial kingpin, and John Cusack, who plays a scheming politician whose daughter is a murder victim.
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Detective Chinatown 1900 is part of a clutch of tentpole Chinese offerings releasing around the world this week as part of the Lunar New Year festivities, which has become the mainland’s most fruitful frame at the box office in recent years. On day one (Jan 29) the film opened to $64 million in China alone. Through today, it has grossed $167 million there.
Previous entries in the now $1.3+ billion grossing Detective Chinatown franchise have followed mismatched duo Qin Feng (Liu), an introvert with incredible powers of deduction, and his cousin Tang Ren (Wang), a bumbling incompetent cop, as they solve murders in the immigrant Chinese neighborhoods of, respectively, Bangkok (2015), New York (2018), and Tokyo (2021).
Tang Ren’s histrionic, oftentimes scatological behavior is offset by Qin Feng’s almost superhuman intuition, and director Chen Sicheng has repeatedly doffed his cap to the BBC’s hugely successful series Sherlock, not least in the vivid visualisations of Holmes’ deductive reasoning.
Further fueling this association, Qin Feng is a self-proclaimed fan of Conan Doyle’s master sleuth, a detail taken one step further in this new period-set prequel. Liu’s character here, named Qin Fu, is first introduced on board a train heading for San Francisco, where he is providing impromptu interpretation for none other than Sherlock Holmes himself. Qin Fu is supposed to be meeting an emissary of China’s Empress Dowager on arrival, sent to catch a gang of political fugitives, but Holmes encourages his new protégé to assume his identity – apparently their names sound similar in Chinese – and investigate the Chinatown murders on his behalf.
The case in question? A young white woman has been found brutally disemboweled in a Chinatown back alley, next to the body of an Indigenous American elder. The woman’s father, mayoral candidate Grant (Cusack), insists a Chinese migrant must be responsible and arrests Bai Zhenbang (Zhang Xincheng), son of neighborhood Godfather Louis Bai (Chow), despite the young man having a cast-iron alibi. Grant intends to use the murder as leverage at an imminent hearing that could see Chinatowns across the United States appropriated by the government, a move that would effectively drive the migrant population out of the country.
Believing Qin Fu to be the world famous detective, Bai senior implores the young medical student to take the case. No sooner does he accept than Qin Fu crosses paths with Ah Gui (Wang), a Chinese orphan who was raised by the dead man as one of his own, and is in town to find the killer. The two out-of-towners band together to crack the case.
Inevitably, the murder is a catalyst for director Chen, this time collaborating with filmmaker Dai Mo, to explore issues of race, immigration and national identity. The rhetoric of the Chinese Exclusion Act for one, wielded by Grant and his political allies, bears an uncanny similarity to policies on immigration and birthright citizenship currently being threatened in the U.S.
The period setting proves sporadically authentic, thanks in large part to the sprawling full-scale sets erected in China’s Shandong province for the production, which provide a lavish and vibrant backdrop to the lively and generally lighthearted proceedings.
The lead performances are broad but engaging, with Chow excelling as the mouthpiece for a community that has been exploited, marginalized and mistreated for decades. Liu and Wang’s characterizations here are markedly different from those delivered in previous entries. Ah Gui is a far more subdued, sympathetic presence than his excruciatingly histrionic predecessor (or should that be successor?), while Qin Fu cuts a more assertive and extroverted figure than his socially awkward descendant.
Cusack is the film’s mustache-twirling villain, a comically despicable foil for a nation’s ire, in a turn that disappointingly doesn’t swing for the fences. This is Cusack’s latest foray in the Chinese system. He previously appeared opposite Jackie Chan in 2015’s historical action epic Dragon Blade, and featured in director Chen’s Decoded. In 2010, Cusack and Chow were both cast in Mikael H?fstr?m’s period thriller Shanghai.
As the credits roll, this breezy, sometimes preachy, but admittedly opulent fin-de-siècle whodunnit finally shows its hand with a tacked-on coda sure to raise an eyebrow or two. The film issues a blanket call to action across its generous runtime, essentially urging frustrated and aggrieved Chinese citizens to return home to the welcoming embrace of the motherland. This is capped by Bai Ke’s elusive fugitive declaring, as he sets sail for China nursing a crate-load of guns, that he will fight for a better homeland whatever the cost. One day, he dreams, his nation will become the greatest country in the world.
Title: Detective Chinatown 1900
Distributor: CMC Pictures
Release Date: January 29, 2025
Directors: Chen Sicheng, Dai Mo
Screenwriter: Chen Sicheng
Cast: Liu Haoran, Wang Baoqiang, Bai Ke, Chow Yun-fat, John Cusack
International Sales: Blossoms Entertainment
Running time: 2hrs 16mins
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