It might be difficult to imagine it right now, given the current geopolitical tensions, but not that long ago, the United States and China were allies and partners, deeply intertwined through business connections famously known as "Chimerica." This economic and political symbiosis found its reflection in Hollywood, with studios increasingly relying on the Chinese market to sustain their box office viability and exploring the number of Chinese-American co-productions. Among the more obscure entries in this catalogue was 2010's period thriller Shanghai, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström. It was a film that promised to capture the glamour and danger of a city on the brink of war, but it ultimately fell into obscurity, remembered more for its star power than its substance.
The script by Hossein Amini sets the story in a peculiar part of the world during a time when the alliance between the USA and China was not yet formalised and they were, in fact, involved in hostilities. The plot unfolds in late Autumn 1941. Peter Soames (John Cusack), is an agent of the US Office of Naval Intelligence. He is sent to Shanghai to investigate the death of his friend and colleague, Conner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). At this stage in history, the Japanese had invaded China and conquered major cities, including Shanghai itself, although the International Settlement—a section of the city with its extraterritorial status—remained formally outside direct Japanese control.
Soames arrives with a cover identity as a journalist and uses false Nazi sympathies to infiltrate the elite social circles of the Settlement. His primary contact is Anthony Lan-Ting, (Chow Yun-fat), a powerful local crime lord who is co-operating closely with Captain Tanaka (Ken Watanabe) from the Japanese secret police. Soames spends his time in nightclubs and casinos and becomes acquainted with Lan-Ting's glamorous wife, Anna (Gong Li). It is through Anna that he discovers her involvement in the Chinese resistance movement. Simultaneously, he learns that Conner had been involved with a Japanese girl named Sumiko (Rinko Kikuchi), whom Tanaka is desperate to find. This personal connection becomes the key to a larger mystery, as Soames begins to suspect that Conner’s death might be linked to intelligence he had gathered concerning the Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga, which was stationed near Shanghai.
The premise behind Shanghai looked quite promising on paper. It offered a combination of a period spy thriller and a noirish mystery set in an exotic location during one of the most fascinating periods in its history. The city served as an oasis of peace during global conflict, very much akin to the eponymous Hollywood classic Casablanca. Mikael Håfström had reunited with John Cusack, with whom he had worked on the highly regarded adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel 1408. The film also boasted a more than respectable cast which included Hong Kong action cinema legend Chow Yun-fat, the Japanese actor who had become a household name in The Last Samurai, and Gong Li, arguably the greatest Chinese film diva who had reached international fame by starring fifteen years earlier in the similarly set period thriller The Shanghai Triad. There was obvious effort to deliver a believable reconstruction of history through music, costumes, and period detail.
Yet, despite all that and the obvious effort to deliver believable reconstruction of history through music, costumes and other period detail, Shanghai fails to live to its potential and looks very disappointing. The main reason for this failure lies in Amini’s uninspired script and conceptual issues. While the main mystery is simple and very personal, it still functions within the context of global conflicts. However, Amini makes fatal mistakes by paying homage to film noir through the protagonist’s voiceover narration. This narration becomes increasingly annoying, but more importantly, it leaves very little doubt about the protagonist surviving beatings, shootings, explosions and all kinds of trouble in the city at the eve of being embroiled in major war. The script essentially does the work for the audience, removing the need for any genuine tension.
Furthermore, Amini even fails to create suspense based on the audience’s foreknowledge that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor and bring the USA into war. The references to this event feel heavy-handed and too obvious. The character of Soames’ boss Richard Astor (David Morse), serves this purpose by providing heavy-handed exposition, claiming that FDR’s oil embargo against Japan would work and force the Japanese to retreat from China. It is clumsy writing that breaks the immersion of the thriller genre.
Behind the scenes, co-producer Bobby Weinstein and his brother Harvey were among the film’s producers. They probably had some vague idea that this film, envisioned as an ambitious prestige production, might have won an Oscar or two. In order to make it more likely, the script includes reference to the Holocaust and German atrocities in occupied Europe. One of the vehicles for that are the undercooked characters of Ben Sanger, played by Hugh Bonneville, a newspaper editor and Soames’ boss who is aghast over Nazi treatment of Jews, as well as Leni Müller, played by Franka Potente, the wife of a German diplomat. These characters feel like they were shoehorned into the story to tick boxes for award consideration rather than serving the narrative.
Some of the fatal weaknesses of the film were not production’s fault, at least not directly. The film was originally supposed to be shot in authentic locations in Shanghai. However, Chinese authorities, apparently unhappy about the controversial graphic sexual content of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, decided to revoke the production's location license and forced the production to move to Thailand, where the Chinese megalopolis was reconstructed through a combination of constructed sets and plenty of CGI. The latter makes Shanghai look cheap, especially during the final scenes of the Japanese takeover of the International Settlement. These scenes pale in comparison with the scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which cover the same event. Spielberg shot on actual Chinese locations, and the difference in texture and authenticity is stark, making the CGI in Shanghai look like a video game rather than a serious war drama.
Weinstein Company, apparently aware that the film would be disappointed, shelved it after its Chinese premiere and had it quietly released in 2015, when it predictably failed to have any impact and remained one of the more obscure pieces of filmographies of everyone involved.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
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