Project Gutenberg (2018) Review

“Project Gutenberg” Chinese Theatrical Poster

Director: Felix Chong
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Aaron Kwok, Zhang Jung-Chu, Joyce Feng, Catherine Chow, Alex Fong, Liu Kai-chi, Yao-Qing Wang, Alien Sun, Carl Ng, Leung Kin-Ping
Running Time: 130 min.

By Paul Bramhall

When a trailer gets released for a movie, it has one job – to make people want to come and see it. Most trailers do that through editing together some of the key moments in order to grab the viewer’s interest, and make them want to see more. But sometimes, trailers don’t play by the rules .Such is the case for Project Gutenberg, which featured a trailer proudly teasing a scene of Chow Yun Fat lighting a dollar note on fire, recreating the famous moment from the seminal A Better Tomorrow. While the 1986 classic was the movie responsible for putting Chow on the map, and credited as creating the Heroic Bloodshed genre, Project Gutenberg is a production being made in a very different era. So different in fact, that it’s now deemed acceptable to swindle your audience, as director and writer Felix Chong later admitted the scene had been filmed especially for the trailer, and is nowhere to be found in the movie itself.

The title, so called after Johannes Gutenberg, the German who introduced printing to Europe with the printing press in the 15th century, is director and writer Felix Chong’s first attempt at directing solo. Usually paired with Alan Mak, together they wrote and co-directed the likes of The Overheard series, and perhaps most famously wrote the Infernal Affairs trilogy together (which Mak co-directed with Andrew Lau). Most recently Chong penned the script for the excellent Extraordinary Mission (which Mak co-directed with Fletcher Poon), so Project Gutenberg marks the first time to truly strike out on his own in the capacity of both director and writer, and brings with him some major Hong Kong talent in front of the camera.

Chow Yun Fat marks his first time to star in a movie which isn’t a sequel since Johnnie To’s 2015 musical Office, and as always it’s a pleasure to see him onscreen. He plays the mysterious ‘Painter’, the leader of a counterfeit currency operation, who takes an interest in the forgery skills of a lowly artist struggling to make ends meet in Canada, played by his Cold War 2 co-star Aaron Kwok. While Chow gets to stretch his rarely used villainous acting chops (2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower feels like a lifetime ago), Kwok appears to be channelling Louis Koo’s performance in 2013’s Drug War. I like Kwok, but he needs a good director to guide his performance, one that can reign in his legendary tendencies to overact. Chong for the large part keeps him in check, with his sullen demeanour only occasionally offset by his jitterbug reactions to the violence he has to witness, in which you can almost feel the effort he’s putting in to restrain himself.

While the performances may be commendable, the pacing is less so. Taking place in the 1990’s, Project Gutenberg’s narrative is told using the same framework utilised in the likes of The Usual Suspects. Kwok, who we meet being transferred from a Thai prison to Hong Kong, tells his story from the interrogation room in flashback. His arrest is seen as a major breakthrough for the father and daughter cop team of Alex Fong (Angels 2) and Catherine Chow (Husband Killers), and they leverage his ex-lover (Zhang Jung-Chu, The Adventurers) to make him start talking about his relationship with the Painter, who no one has ever seen. While Kwok’s own art may not have made the cut, his talent for imitation soon sees him responsible for creating the ‘superdollar’ – the ultimate counterfeit $100 bill – and it’s this process which sees the pace come to a grinding halt.

The main issue is that Fong spends so much time dedicated to Chow and Kwok figuring out how to create the perfect counterfeit, it almost begins to feel like a documentary on true crime. There’s no real threat to keep the suspense simmering, it’s not clear what the end game is (apart from, well, making the perfect counterfeit), and none of the characters have a particularly engaging motive for doing what they do. Instead, an inordinate amount of time is spent watching shots involving paper and ink, set to a mildly exciting score, as if this is considered to be sufficient to keep the audience’s attention. It’s kind of like if A Better Tomorrow was 30 minutes longer, with a bunch of additional scenes detailing the counterfeit process, before Chow and Ti Lung get to their iconic dollar burning scene together. While the level of research Chong’s done is admirable, every last detail of it didn’t necessarily need to make it to the screen.

The biggest elephant in the room with Project Gutenberg though, is also its biggest asset – Chow Yun Fat. To put it bluntly, he’s miscast, the irony being that it appears to be a character written specifically for him. On paper his role is one of a ruthless villain driven by greed and little else, however onscreen, there’s a burden to recall his days of being the Heroic Bloodshed genres most iconic thespian. There are three shootouts, and two of them feature Chow front and center, however it’s only the one where he has the least involvement that feels like a natural part of the narrative. The first one literally starts in the middle of a road with zero build-up, and finishes with Chow brandishing a handgun in each fist. I’m sure it’s supposed to be a crowd cheering moment, however onscreen it comes across as a gratuitous and unnecessary piece of fan service. Like the scene in the trailer, it would have been better to leave it out altogether.

Then there’s an awkwardly inserted flashback within a flashback, which almost feels as if came from another movie entirely. Decked out in a white suit, and laying on the charm that’s made him such a legend of HK cinema, Chow and his cohorts visit a general in the Golden Triangle (do characters in HK movies ever go to there for any other reason!?) to negotiate a deal. However there’s a side motive – the General is also the one responsible for the death of Chow’s father. Cue a completely over the top action scene, which has Chow brandishing an assault rifle in each hand like a one-man army, and even throws in the patented flying through the air while shooting at the same time shot (only performed with wires, he is 63 after all). Again, it’s a scene in which you feel obliged to be excited because, well, it’s Chow Yun Fat shooting people. But it’s so disconnected from the actual plot, it becomes impossible to connect to as an audience.

It also has to be pointed out that Hong Kong cinema hasn’t improved much in portraying Canada since the likes of Return Engagement and Women on the Run (ok, admittedly there’s no thugs playing soccer with a puppy here). It’s ironic that the best English line delivery comes from its Asian cast, in the form of David Wang (Wine War) and Carl Ng (Operation Mekong), with the delivery and lines attributed to the ‘Canadian’ cops best described as an assault on the ears. You would think that if the budget allowed for a whole village to be rigged to explode in spectacular fashion, it could also stretch to hiring a gweilo actor that could enunciate their single line of dialogue correctly.

Project Gutenberg opts for a big twist in its final reel, not all of which is completely believable. I have a theory that Chong had probably watched Kwok in 2009’s Murderer, and figured if they got away with what they did there, then even the wildest twist they could come up with can only pale in comparison. He’s partly correct. However even the big twist can’t escape the newly re-branded NRTA (formerly known as SARFT – China’s censorship board for media). With an even more stringent set of regulations of what is and isn’t considered acceptable to be shown introduced in 2018, the closing moments resort to a generic, safe, and entirely predicable conclusion. The kind which make you let out an audible groan, combined with an involuntary rolling of the eyes.

It’s something we can expect to see more of moving forward, as the more a story focuses on criminals and moral ambiguity, the more the ending will need to emphasise that they all got punished accordingly. Project Gutenberg ticks those boxes like it should, but with such predictability making these tales a foregone conclusion, the real punishment is inflicted on the audiences that watch them.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10