“The Four 2” Theatrical Poster
Director: Gordon Chan
Co-director: Janet Chun
Cast: Crystal Liu Yi Fei, Deng Chao, Anthony Wong Chau Sang, Cheng Taishen, Colin Chou, Ronald Cheng Chung Kei, Wu Xiubo, Yu Chenghui, Ken Lo
Running Time: 118 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Hot on the coat tails of 2012’s The Four, the following year The Four 2 hit the screens, arriving with the announcement that a third instalment had been filmed back-to-back with the sequel. Considering the first entry in director Gordon Chan’s reimagining of the The Four Great Constables was an underwhelming experience, more than 10 years since their release it may seem a bewildering thought as to how a sequel was green lit so quickly. The answer is very much connected to the early 2010’s era that they were made in, which saw China going through an economic boom, and going to the cinema becoming one of the nation’s favorite past times. Cinemas were built in their hundreds in a very short space of time, and local audiences lapped it up with seeming little regard to if the movies they were going to see were actually good or not. The same explanation can be applied to how a movie like 2013’s Switch came to exist.
The Four brought together a cast of popular Hong Kong and Mainland talent for a tale that many would have been familiar with, even if just in passing, so the fact that it became a box office success wasn’t such a big surprise when considering such factors. A more interesting question is how returning directors Gordon Chan and Janet Chun perceived The Four’s success – did they figure they got everything just right and should approach another instalment in the exact same way, or did they feel there was room for improvement and attempt to tweak the formula? Tragically, when it comes to The Four 2 it would appear to be the former, with the sequel striking the same tone, and more critically making many of the same mistakes as its predecessor.
After the events of the first Cold Blood and Emotionless are now an item, played by Deng Chao and Crystal Liu, which seemed to be the main driver for much of the The Four’s runtime. Even the tension between the law enforcement agencies the Divine Constabulary and Department Six has dissipated, with their leaders Anthony Wong and Cheng Taishen now able to share amicable cups of tea together, and dispense such wisdom like “we’re all walking the same path, how far we travel depends on ourselves.” All of this unfolds in the opening scenes, which for some reason has both teams apparently picnicking in a forest together, until a strong scent of blood catches Chao’s heightened sense of smell, leading them to a remote dwelling where everyone has been massacred.
Upon taking it upon himself to pry open the locked gate, Chao finds himself caught in the crossfire when someone inside the property unleashes the thunderbolt plough, a kind of portable cannon that fits onto the arm like a sleeve, and was the chosen weapon of Wong back in the day when he was on active duty. Reeling from the weapons power and with his clothes set alight, it’s his old flame from Department Six Jiang Yi-Nan who throws herself on top of him to put them out, leaving the wheelchair bound Crystal Liu to sit there looking scornful. That’s right, the all-important love triangle that presumably directors Chan and Chun must have thought kept people glued to their seats in the first instalment, is still present and accounted for in the sequel. Most significantly though, when the doors blasted open Deng got a brief glimpse of the person brandishing the thunderbolt plough – and it was The Four’s leader Anthony Wong.
So the scene is set for a suitably engaging mystery. It turns out the victims of the massacre have a connection to the murder of Liu’s family 12 years earlier, and just how much does their presumed morally upstanding leader Wong know that he was willing to almost kill one of his own!? It would be engaging of course, if it was in the hands of a more competent filmmaker. Much like the original, the script in The Four 2 allows the audience full view of what the villains are up to, serving to remove any sense of urgency or intrigue from the investigation that we watch unfold in the most pedestrian fashion possible. It’s also debatable if the sequel should be called The Four 2 at all, since Collin Chou and Ronald Cheng’s returning characters of Iron Hands and Life Snatcher have so little to do they barely register as being there at all. However I guess The Two 2 would sound pretty ridiculous, so that idea was nipped in the bud.
The Four’s big bad turns out to still be alive as well, played by a returning Wu Xiubo, who after the events of the first was rescued by his father and connected to a life sustaining tree, the result of which now sees him as an immobile half man half tree tentacled monstrosity who can only communicate by telepathy. Xiubo spends his time bothering Department Six’s double-agent Jiang Yi-Nan in her dreams to remind her he’s still alive, while at the same time still looking to destabilise the country by flooding it with counterfeit currency. You know, that plot point that should be the main narrative driver, but feels like its 3rd or 4th down the list of what The Four 2 and its predecessor choose to focus on. Notably Xiubo’s father is played by Mainland martial arts cinema legend Yu Chenghui, who played the bad guy in Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple trilogy, here looking for all intents and purposes like an evil version of Gandalf.
It’s a frustrating experience watching The Four 2 as it’s clear a lot of effort has been put into it. There are some impressively grandiose sets in their scale, creative editing is used to transition between scenes, and the special effects are solid (even if some of the greenscreen work is blatantly obvious). However the bloated runtime once more clocks in at just under 2 hours, and with a narrative structure that doesn’t understand the basic rules of creating a mystery for the audience to be engaged in, large portions frequently become a chore to sit through.
These problems extend to the casting. Crystal Liu remains woefully miscast, and is laden with a handful of scenes that require some intense emoting, a range that she just doesn’t have, the result of which will likely only induce feelings of second-degree embarrassment in the audience. Similarly, like in the first it’s never clear what the point is of Chao’s ability to turn into a raging beast (which here sees him look like an extra from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), which in the sequel is used even more sparingly than it was in The Four, and none of the transformations are done in the context of an action scene. Still, at least this time we get the unexpected match up of Crystal Liu using a mix of crutches and telepathic floating to go up against Ken Lo, unfortunately not returning as his character of the Moon Monster from Holy Virgin versus the Evil Dead.
Speaking of action, once more it’s Ku Huen-Chio on fight choreography duty, and he does at least get more to do here than he did a year prior. Surprisingly it’s Anthony Wong who gets a fair dose of the action chops, utilizing the bagua style in a way which perfectly compliments his zen like demeanour (some less kind reviewers may choose to call it phoning it in). The highlight though is saved for an extended prison breakout sequence that serves to show exactly what kind of movies The Four franchise should be. With Wong and Liu imprisoned in iron vests that have acupuncture holes to block their qi energy (the wuxia equivalent of Magneto’s glass prison in the X-Men movies), finally Chou and Cheng take centre stage to take on a small army of prison guards. Chou’s even made a pair of hydraulic metal legs for Liu to slip into, allowing her to become a lethal kicking machine, something she does far more convincingly than emoting.
Alas though the excitement that this scene generates is short lived, when The Four 2 decides to close out with a painfully long exposition dump, which sees everyone return to the site of the massacre and literally stand there reeling off what must have been pages of information in the guise of character interaction. Ultimately the sequels biggest crime is that it feels like an extension of the first, nothing more and nothing less, which is all the more frustrating considering the brief glimpses we get of what it could have been.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10
