Wonders never cease in this job. I found a movie that celebrates the best of America, and it’s a Chinese film. Detective Chinatown 1900 isn’t even some high-minded drama, but rather the fourth movie in a blockbuster entertainment franchise. None of this makes the film good, as you’ll see, but it does make for something unique at AMC Grapevine Mills.
If you’re not familiar with the Detective Chinatown series, these films started up in 2015. They all star Wang Baoqiang and Liu Haoran as detectives who solve crimes while also extricating themselves from comic situations, and they all take place in Chinese neighborhoods outside of China. 1900 is the first of these set in a historical period rather than the present day, and the first where director Chen Sicheng (who created the series) takes on a co-director in Dai Mo.
The crime here also racially charges the movie in a way that the previous films weren’t: A young white woman named Alice Grant (Anastasia Shestakova) is found stabbed and disemboweled in a back alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a Native American chief is also murdered when he stumbles on the killing. Alice’s father (John Cusack) just happens to be a powerful politician who hates the Chinese, and with personal vengeance driving him, he wants the Chinese rounded up into concentration camps. Speaking of personal vengeance, an orphaned Chinese boy named Ah Gui (Wang) who was taken in by the chief’s tribe wants justice for the chief, so he teams up with Qin Fu (Liu), a green young detective who’s fresh off two months working alongside Sherlock Holmes himself (Andrew Charles Stokes) and absorbing all of his methods.
Where to begin with the stuff that’s wrong here? How about the fact that the Native Americans are all clearly played by Asian actors? They’re mostly from Central Asia rather than China, for what that’s worth (probably not very much). They are actually speaking Navajo in the movie. I’m not qualified to judge how good their Navajo is, but given that the Anglophone actors here can barely speak intelligible English, I’m not overly confident.
Beyond that, the movie makes hash out of the natives’ culture and medicine, and its depiction of Ah Gui would make even James Fenimore Cooper blush. (He tells the difference between a city horse and a country horse by eating its dung, much to Qin Fu’s disgust.) Again, this is hardly surprising given that its grasp of white culture is shaky as well: The script is fuzzy on the distinction between Republicans and Democrats and seems to think that a city mayor is more powerful than a U.S. Senator. It doesn’t help that Cusack once again appears to be sleepwalking through his part, or that the solution to the murder plot is so convoluted that it takes forever to explain, or a limp subplot involves a buffoonish royal emissary (Yue Yunpeng) sent from Beijing to arrest Chinese communists hiding out in California. Admittedly, though, it is funny when that guy, who’s suspicious of all Americans, gets robbed by Chinese criminals as soon as he steps off the boat.
So what does work here? It is ingenious how the plot incorporates the stage magician who calls himself Ching Ling Foo (Wei Xiang) into the story as a witness in the murder case. Ching Ling Foo was a real Chinese entertainer, by the way, who was conducting a highly successful tour of America during this time period.
Even better is the way the film raises the specter of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which Grant seeks to revive a decade after the real-life law barred all Chinese immigrants into America. While I seriously doubt that the filmmakers intended to draw any parallels with present-day politics, it’s hard to ignore how the current White House is inflicting similar cruelties on immigrants from Latin America by demonizing them as thugs and vectors of disease.
The Chinatown mob boss (Chow Yun-Fat, playing broader here than usual) who provides protection for Chinese workers because his white politician friends won’t do it is the one who sees the worst of America and also stands up in front of the San Francisco city council to appeal to their better natures. It turns out that even Chinese filmmakers — if not necessarily their government — want Americans to be decent people again. While the movie ends with the mob boss going back to Hong Kong, he tells the detectives to stay in America for a while, saying, “We have much to learn from this place.” Both Chinese and American audiences would do well to listen to him.
Detective Chinatown 1900
Starring Liu Haoran and Wang Baoqiang. Directed by Chen Sicheng and Dai Mo. Written by Chen Sicheng. Not rated.
