RED CORNER (38)

Directed by: Jon Avnet

Starring: Richard Gere, Bai Ling, Byron Mann

The Pitch: An American lawyer in Beijing picks up a girl at a nightclub, spends the night with her - then wakes up to find himself framed for her murder.

Theo Sez: Brownie-points for everyone, plus a welcome boost for Gere's pet cause, Tibetan independence : an Issue Movie about an issue (horrors of the Chinese penal system) that pretty much everyone agrees is a Bad Thing can only be a win-win situation - except, perhaps, for the audience. The premise grips, albeit in a crude MIDNIGHT EXPRESS kind of way : our hero's beaten, starved, zapped with a stun-gun and assaulted with Orwellian aphorisms ("Leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist"), and Gere, though he probably doesn't know it, is just smug and obnoxious enough to escape the piteousness that would've reduced the character to a helpless victim ; it's effectively nightmarish (for a while, anyway), especially in the trial scenes with our hero desperately trying to follow the simultaneous translation of the Chinese-language goings-on. Trouble is, the film doesn't have the guts to upset its audience - it wants to evoke confusion and alienation without actually confusing or alienating anyone : the result is all over the place, from its wildly inconsistent characters to its strange, contradictory view of China (Beijing a hell of goose-stepping guards and surveillance cameras, the action stopping for a speech denouncing the Cultural Revolution - but the "new" capitalist China also disparaged, and the villain turning out to be an entrepreneur trying to bring "Baywatch"-style programming to Chinese screens). Basically it doesn't know what it wants to be (courtroom drama? action thriller? Political Statement?), its confusion typified by the way it handles the language issue : terrified of subtitles but unwilling to fall back on Charlie Chan accents, it has the Chinese characters speaking Mandarin in some scenes and English in others - our heroine, ludicrously, starts with the former then changes to the latter as we get to know her better. By the end, with the languages getting all mixed up and the simultaneous translation starting to emote along with the actors, it's crossed the line firmly into unintentional hilarity - its Bad Movie status sealed by our hero's lachrymose speech about his dead daughter, the silliest Gere moment since his phone-booth outburst in INTERSECTION : "Have you ever watched little girls playing soccer?..."