Hot pot hero： a pot of hot and spicy platter
"Hot Pot Hero" began an overwhelming publicity.
In addition to starring Chen Kun and Bai Baihe, they are still first-class stars, and the audience knows little about the director and story of this film. From the perspective of the overall Chinese film market, where the box office is hot, but the quality is poor, this great probability will be another mediocre money-making work.
Fortunately, Qing Yang, the director and screenwriter, handed in an answer sheet that satisfied most of the audience. Producer Chen Guofu and other behind-the-scenes personnel escorted the film production and announcement, which did not disappoint people. As a result, public opinion began to wave the flag and shout one-sidedly, and praise words such as "Top Ten of the Scheduled Year" and "Another Crazy Stone" appeared one after another.
Objectively speaking, Hot Pot Hero is somewhat similar to Crazy Stone. It is also a comedy factor in crime; It is also a small and medium-sized film that lacks anticipation in advance but makes people feel a little surprised; Similarly, the director is familiar with Hollywood and other commercial films, and he is localized twice; Even chose the mountain city of Chongqing as the cultural foundation of the film.
However, there are still obvious differences in their overall styles and stories. Hot pot hero is not as "happy" as "Crazy Stone", but the action design is more "black". It doesn’t follow the complicated multi-clue narrative of Crazy Stone, but it is more like the bizarre street news adapted from Story Club.
Not bad, but not so perfect.
-well, you still have to see it yourself to know.
The following is a brief spoiler:
The following is a brief spoiler:
The following is a brief spoiler:
Three good friends and old classmates (played by Yu Entai, Qin Hao, Chen Kun) jointly opened the "Dongzi Hot Pot", a hot pot restaurant, which will soon close down due to poor management. In order to resell more money, they decided to dig and expand privately. I didn’t expect this excavation to accidentally dig through the basement of the bank next door. The three men didn’t dare to steal money, but just wanted to fill the hole quietly, so they contacted the female classmate (Bai Baihe) who works in the bank. According to the general story logic, Bai Baihe happened to have a crush on Chen Kun, so he decided to help them do the floor repair.
However, Chen Kun likes gambling, owing a lot of debts outside, and he moved the selfishness of "borrowing some first". Although the protagonist is not a bad person morally, he is still hesitant about stealing money, but in the end, the money was taken away by the creditor, and the protagonist also decided to report to the police and surrender.
This is the first half of the film: a piece of street news that Mr. Chen, a citizen, dug his own basement and accidentally dug through the tunnel of the bank next door.
Just then, the bank was robbed by four masked gangsters. The police are too busy to pay attention to the important clue of "there is a tunnel under the bank", so the protagonist can only enter the bank alone from the tunnel to rescue the female classmate. However, gangsters with excellent professional skills subdued the protagonist and three classmates, tied four people and burned them alive. At the most dangerous time, the former creditor brought someone to the door again because of the dispute, and launched a bloody fight with the bank robbers. In order not to let Chen Kun, the protagonist, become the "rescued one", he finally arranged a one-on-one confrontation with the gangster leader.
This is the second half of the film: "bank robbers robbed the vault" and "citizen Mr. Chen became a hero".
The brief spoiler is over.
The brief spoiler is over.
The brief spoiler is over.
Because of well-known reasons, bank robbers in our country will certainly come to no good end, no matter how many hostages there are. Therefore, as a special category of crime comedy, "bank robbery" is loved by people all over the world, but our story here is not easy to write. In the plot, we can see that the director vaguely handled some difficulties and passed the review. For example, the protagonist was not bank panic, but he accidentally created a bank tunnel-he didn’t strengthen the performance of the criminal process, or he made up for the legal responsibility of stealing money in the second half-he didn’t let a bad guy go. This also left some obvious plot loopholes: for example, the bank basement didn’t even have a monitoring-although it was an old bank to be rebuilt, or the police responded to bank robbery, except shouting and assaulting from the main entrance, they never thought that it was possible to obtain evidence from the next door.
Of course, the localization of the theme of the script is still very successful, although it draws on the factors of many Hollywood films, the personality and culture of the characters are still China’s characteristics. Part of the rhythm is a little slow, but the whole is still bright.
And the director’s handling method can also be regarded as rich and changeable.
Many of them are clearly recognizable world movie platters: the opening four cold robbers with masks, including the tense and low soundtrack design, are learning Batman 2, the Dark Knight; The form of explaining the contents of crimes by scanning them one by one through the monitor comes from the beginning of Geric’s Stealing and Kidnapping. The action design of several fights is the style of the Korean film old boys, and the action director of this film is also Korean; The fighting action with slightly sad classical music belongs to the Korean style of Park Chan-wook and others; At the end, the tragic private fight between the two people in the alley is similar to the black temperament of the Hong Kong film "Dog Bites Dog" … The so-called world articles are copied a lot, and the sources of copying are wide, so it does not become copying, but becomes a kind of learning, reference and re-creation.
The director is like making a table of Chongqing hot pot. The raw materials are all the same. He rinsed it in the homemade unique sauce and it still has a unique hot taste after coming out.
Qing Yang, the director and screenwriter, actually jumped into the audience’s field of vision six years ago with the low-budget crime comedy Nightclub. At that time, the actors of the film, such as Xú Zhēng and Zhang Jiayi, were not as popular as they are today. Six years later, the film market is still booming, and Hot Pot Hero has been upgraded a lot compared with Nightclub, but the director’s pursuit reflected in it is the same strain: based on commercial stories, packaged with entertainment elements such as action, crime and comedy. Although compared with Ning Hao’s films, the theme is not more complicated, the director’s techniques are equally rich, and they are all good at learning from world films.
Most importantly, they are all local directors, rooted in the civic base of the city. There is a meticulous and realistic interest in the script and the grasp of characters. This is an excellent foreign director, and Hong Kong and South Korean filmmakers can’t match it.
"Hot Pot Hero" is not a perfect film, although entertainment scenes such as action violence have been done well, sometimes the treatment is still too heavy and slightly dramatic. For example, in order to save her colleagues in front of the bank robbers, Bai Baihe suddenly fell into a literary and artistic memory of her feelings in such a tense and high-pressure environment-that is, when the pot was about to boil, she added a handful of cold water, which made it impossible to feed. Before the whole film, it was going on intermittently, and the director seemed to have handled it too complicated. The emotions of comedy, love and friendship were not consistent, which led to the lack of strong flavor. Fortunately, at the end of the series of violent actions, the temperature was pushed forward layer by layer and finally reached the edge of the outbreak.
In any case, this domestic film is finally close to the level of Korean films. Although South Korea’s film market is only a fraction of ours, it has experienced the learning process of Hollywood since the beginning of 2000, and has continuously introduced genre films combined with South Korea’s localization. Not only is the film industry at a high level, but the creative method of combining editing and directing has also produced many works with outstanding business and style. To this day, it is still a good work every year. The same is true of the study of Hot Pot Hero on South Korea and Hollywood. I believe that director Qing Yang’s future works will be more mature and full, and the overall improvement of film quality will finally be worthy of our growing box office.