City Under Siege

As far as incorrectly descriptive, potentially misleading titles go, ‘City Under Siege’ might just take the cake. From the title you might assume it was some sort of gritty crime thriller or war film, and I’m sure you’d guess that there’d be some sort of city that would be under some sort of siege. Well you’d be wrong on all counts because ‘City Under Siege’ is actually about Circus Mutants. It’s a mostly light-hearted superhero action movie of sorts about a knife-throwing circus performer who gets super powers and has to fight off his evil, mutated co-workers. And it’s actually pretty fun.

 Sunny (Aaron Kwok) is a clown working for a circus troupe, but his real ambition is to be a knife thrower, a skill he claims to excel at but nobody believes him. This is mostly due to the bullying and objections of Chu (Collin Chou), the troupe’s popular, professional knife thrower. Chu, a charming performer, is actually a violent and cruel thug who, with some of his fellow performers, is determined to get rich and leave the circus. When they hear about a legendary horde of gold buried in a nearby mountain, Chu and his gang violently search for it, with the curious, innocent Sunny accidentally getting caught up in the search.

The search for the treasure goes awry when they accidentally release a noxious experimental gas from World War 2 that mutates the troupe into super-powered freaks.  While Chu and his followers become beastly mutants, Sunny retains his normal appearance but finds himself with super powered strength and senses. He soon meets ambitious news anchor Angel (Shu Qi), who initially disregards him and his story. When his super-powered nature becomes public, Angel sees an opportunity and has Sunny cash in on his sudden popularity through various product endorsements and publicity events.

Meanwhile Chu and his followers continue to mutate and go on a crime spree but become violently jealous of Sunny’s popularity and un-mutated appearance. They start to target Sunny and Angel, and it’s up to Sunny, and a duo of mutant-fighting government agents, to take Chu and the other mutants down.

 

It’s a fun, simple movie with decent action scenes. It’s often cartoonish in a superhero-ish way, with fight scenes that have characters jumping across the screen (thanks to wires) or throwing CGI knives at each other. Chu and the other mutants get more ridiculous as they mutate – it starts with dark veins, hair loss and mangled teeth and, by the end, they have swollen muscular arms and claws. It’s mostly light hearted, though it goes a little heavy at times (the whole ‘World War 2 toxic gas’ stuff is weird). It also goes through some of the expected scenes for a superhero type of film (like Sunny realising he has super sense, and a training montage before the final battle). The film also gets a little side tracked with some romance subplots.

There are two weird romance subplots. The two secret agents who are investigating the mutants have a doomed romance subplot that gets melodramatic fast, which is strange because we don’t really know much about them. Even stranger is the Sunny/Angel relationship – he’s hopelessly positive and well-meaning and she’s nice, but her actions can come across as a bit selfish and self-centred – she instantly starts cashing in on Sunny’s popularity by making the naïve, absent minded hero do product placements and TV spots for cash. It also feels more like a ‘friendship’ than a romantic relationship between the two – neither one seems to be in love with each other, they just become good friends. That doesn’t stop the movie from pushing the romance angle. Towards the end of the film a love song plays while flashbacks to scenes of the two together play. It’s exceptionally sappy.

It’s an entertaining movie and the performances are pretty decent, if a little simple. Aaron Kwok is sympathetic and likeable as Sunny. Collin Chou is weird in his villainous role, actually being comparatively mellow compared to his fellow mutants and developing a weird obsession with Angel. Shu Qi is an interesting case. She’s an actress that can lend herself to some great comedic moments with good timing and delivery (like in the beginning of Conquering the Demons) but, more often than not, she seems to do melodramatic roles where she weeps and usually gets killed tragically (…like at the end of Conquering the Demons). Here she does a little bit of both as Angel (she doesn’t die though – spoiler alert and whatever). It’s thoroughly important to note that Shu Qi started out doing nude modelling and softcore porn, so there are interesting photos of her available on the interwebz.

One issue I had was that my DVD copy is stuck in a horrible 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning that even on a large television the picture only appears in a small box in the centre of the screen. I despise aspect ratios like that. Also for some odd reason he subtitles appeared in both Chinese and English (my DVD is a PAL copy).

In the end I liked the movie. It's a little all over the place, and it takes some weird detours from your traditional superhero flick (the publicity train angle is really odd) but it's entertaining and fun. They really should have called it something other than 'City Under Siege' though.