Red Corner Directed by Jon Avnet Starring: Richard Gere, Bai Ling Running time: 123 minutes
At one point during Red Corner, I found myself more interested in following along with a famous tune in the soundtrack, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", than I was in the film itself. Bad sign.
Red Corner, directed by Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Up Close and Personal) stars Richard Gere as Jack Moore, a general counselor for a major American entertainment conglomerate. He is in Beijing, trying to close a multi-billion dollar deal to bring top tv trash to China. (Basically Baywatch type stuff.)
It starts off interestingly enough. Moore meets a Chinse woman at a fashion show and goes to her place for some good old fashioned movie sex. (You know the routine. She wears his clothes, shots of champagne overflowing out of a glass is a metaphor for orgasms.) He is awakened the next morning by a Chinese soldier who drags him from the bed in his curiously blood-stained shirt, shows him the slashed body of the woman from the night before, and throws him in prison. Moore soon learns that the justice system there is vastly different from our own, and is told repeatedly that those who confess get off easier than those who try to fight it. Guilty until proven innocent, and that is highly unlikely.
Gere gives a flat, lackluster performance. His character is confused by the goings on in the courtroom at one moment, then proves the judge wrong by siting examples from Chinese law books a moment later. Moore becomes emotionally, but not romantically involved with his attorney, and yet we are never clear why. Neither shares a great deal with the other about their personal lives. The emotional aspect is muddled and lost within the attempt at suspense.
The editing is incredibly obvious in some scenes. There are occasional flashes back to seemingly miscellaneous shots from earlier in the film. Breif fades from black and white into color pull us out and makes us wonder what is going on. Edits from the climactic scene cut between two similar-looking rooms in which important action is taking place with two seperate sets of characters. Yet the there are no transitions. The dialogue in these scenes are all in Chinese, and so the viewer is forced to read subtitles, and gets lost between rooms on the cuts.
This uninspired film tells us that if we are blamed for a heinous crime, we'd better not be in China, because of what we'd have to go through. However, if we are, there is certainly a way for the cocky American to beat hundreds of years of tradition, and show China how its judicial system is wrong. Thumbs down for everyone in and involved with this film. The only visually impressive aspect is the Chinese courtroom. Production designer Richard Sylbert manages to create an imposing, massive room that makes the accused, and the viewer, feel incredibly unlucky to be there. There is nothing here that we havn't seen numerous times before.
1 1/2 out of 4 stars. Copyright (C) 1997 Nicholas Amado
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