Detective Chinatown 1900

2/1/2025

At times this is actually quite a fun spoof along the lines of "Sherlock Holmes" meets "Charlie Chan" by way of "High Noon" but for the most part it's a mess of a film that goes on for far too long. With the Manchu court facing the great powers we saw in "55 Days at Peking" (1963) the Empress Dowager dispatches her finest officer to San Francisco to track down a traitor. As it happens, the Holmesian "Fu" (Haoran Liu) is also in that very city on a quest for the killer of the daughter of senator "Grant" (John Cusack). Quite swiftly his investigation and the imperial mission start to overlap as the enthusiastic "Fu" and his newfound spiritual Indian guide "Gui" (Baoqiang Wang) discover that the prime suspect in the killing (Steven Zhang) is the son of local entrepreneur "Bai" (Chow Yun-Fat)