Schemes in Antiques (2021) Review

“Schemes in Antiques” Theatrical Poster

Director: Derek Kwok
Cast: Lei Jiayin, Li Xian, Xin Zhilei, Ge You, Qin Yan, Qingxiang Wang, Yong Mei, Tao Guo
Running Time: 123 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Movies about antiques may not necessarily sound like the most exciting proposition on paper, but if there’s one thing that 2003’s Ong Bak taught us, it’s that if the antique in question is a buddha’s head, then prepare for your expectations to be subverted. 18 years later, and China has released Schemes in Antiques, which focuses on the quest to retrieve a, you guessed it, buddha’s head. Uninspired title aside, this particular outing is based on Ma Boyong’s novel of the same name, and involves the mission to repatriate the national treasure in question from Japan, whom it was gifted to by a traitor in World War II. It’s now 1992, and Japan want to give it back, a significant gesture which will be televised with the full bells and whistles. There’s just one catch – the Japanese wish to handover the head to a descendent of the traitor that originally gifted it to them.

Enter Lei Jia-Yin (Cliff Walkers, A Writer’s Odyssey) who plays the traitors grandson, a gifted antiques expert with an eye for telling the real from the fake, but who spends most of his time in a drunken stupor while half heartedly running a dilapidated electronics repair shop. Jia-Yin’s shoddy state is explained by the fact his family have been treated as “the pariahs of the antique world” ever since his grandfathers’ betrayal, his interest in antiques now limited to running scams at local auctions, where he uses his skills to cast doubt over items authenticity and pick them up for cheap. Now finding himself thrust back into the spotlight as the intended recipient of the head, upon having the opportunity to witness it for the first time, Jia-Yin suspects a fake. What’s the deal – are the Japanese up to their old tricks!? Was it always a fake!? Where’s the real one!? Is Jia-Yin just drunk!?

All of these admittedly not particularly thrilling questions are framed in the even less thrilling context of needing to be answered before the televised handover event takes place. Watching the plot of Schemes in Antiques unfold, I was reminded of the legendary Andy Lau vehicle Switch, in which he plays a secret agent whose mission is to find a painting that’s been stolen before it goes on display to the general public. The stakes didn’t feel particularly high there, and they don’t really feel any higher this time around. However while Switch had a so-bad-it’s-good quality going for it, Schemes in Antiques is very much playing things straight (ok, we do get Jia-Yin busting out a Beggar So style display of drunken antiques kung fu in the opening scene, which is bizarrely never seen or heard of again), but it does have one trump card up its sleeve that Switch definitely didn’t have, and that’s Derek Kwok sitting in the director’s chair.

Returning to directing for the first time since 2017’s underseen Wu Kong, Kwok is one of the few latter-day directors who still feels firmly rooted in Hong Kong. From his 2008 triad potboiler The Moss to the 2014 firefighter drama As the Light Goes Out, alongside the likes of Edmond Pang Ho-Cheung, Kwok’s work captures Hong Kong life in a way that feels increasingly rare. He’s also proven to be an effective co-director, with his collaborations resulting in the likes of the old-school kung fu homage Gallants (which he co-directed with Clement Cheng) and alien-themed badminton drama Full Strike (which he co-directed with Henri Wong). What makes Schemes in Antiques unique for Kwok as a director is that it marks the first time for him to helm a movie which is clearly aimed at the Mainland demographic, with the Hong Kong look and feel that defined so much of his work up until this point very much missing in action.

The switch in focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if anyone can make a thriller revolving around antiques provide some ‘thrills’, then Kwok is certainly a director whose experience positions him well. Unfortunately, much like the way 2018’s Project Gutenberg (which interestingly also took place in the 1990’s) struggled to make the art of counterfeiting all that interesting for the screen, so Schemes in Antiques also fails to make the art of telling which antiques are real and which are fake engaging for the audience. Creating lavish CGI dragons that swirl around the screen to represent the different shades of paint on a pair of vases looks great, but ultimately the conversation behind it is still talking about paint tones on a pair of vases. It’s just not particularly interesting.

Jia-Yin is joined on his epic quest to find the real buddha’s head by Xin Zhilei (The Rescue, Brotherhood of Blades 2), while they have a rival in the form of Li Xian (Soul Snatcher, The Captain) who wants to discover the real head first. All three are descendants of the once renowned antiques expert group The Plum Blossom Five, and one of the last surviving members of their grandfather’s generation, played by Qin Yan (Wu Xia, Hero), believes that Xian is a more suitable representative to receive the head rather than the drunken Jia-Yin. So yes, the primary motivation for Xian wanting to find the head first is so that he can be the one who receives it during the ceremony. Did I mention the stakes don’t feel that high? As such a sense of urgency or danger is lacking from much of the narrative, despite what often feels like somewhat desperate attempts to inject some (look out for a ridiculous gang brawl that comes out of nowhere).

The plot does attempt to work in a character arc dealing with Jia-Yin’s trauma caused by his father walking out on him as a kid, however even this is mainly used as a device to uncover a number of puzzles he left behind, rather than making Jia-Yin a more relatable character. Revealing hidden messages through everything from morse code to positioning of the pieces in a game of Go, these scenes involve the usual tropes associated with the adventure genre (a typical example sees an antique vase unsurprisingly turn out to be the key to unlocking a door). Feeling like a carry-over from China’s brief mid-10’s trend of tomb raiding flicks (see Mojin: The Lost Legend and 7 Guardians of the Tomb), the familiarity of such sequences only serves to makes them feel considerably more laborious than they actually are, adding nothing new in terms of execution.

The other problem with Jia-Yin’s character arc is its blatant predictability. The challenge with making any movie under the restrictions that Chinese cinema has to adhere to, is that for movies like this the mysteries that they hinge on bear very little mystery. Would a Chinese really betray their own country and gift its sworn enemy one of its national treasures? Of course not, the Chinese population portrayed in its cinematic output have too much of an unwavering love for their country to ever do such a thing, so when the grand reveal eventually happens at the end of the bloated 2-hour runtime, it warrants more of a shrug of the shoulders than anything else. That’s after having to endure a 3-buddha head stand-off that requires a lot of exposition, and is bound to leave you wishing they’d shortened the buddha’s name from “the Wu Zetian Imperial Meeting Hall Jade Maitreya Bodhisattva statue.”

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Schemes in Antiques makes for a much more entertaining novel than it does a movie. The quest for the buddha’s head could well be a real page turner, but transferred to the big screen Kwok has produced a movie which feels clunky and tonally dull. Even the presence of veterans like Ge You (Gone With the Bullets, The Banquet) do little to brighten up proceedings, although his presence is worth a mention purely for his death scene which a melancholic song plays over, the lyrics of which appear onscreen as we watch an unwarranted montage of his characters finest moments. So if you have a craving for some depressing karaoke, Schemes in Antiques is almost tailor made for you. As a fan of Derek Kwok though, little of his distinctive directorial style is on display here. Like the antiques lining the shelves that we see throughout, Schemes in Antiques would perhaps also be best left on the shelf as well.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10