A famous Chinese Yuan Dynasty painting known as “Dwelling in Fuchun Mountains” is stolen and sold on the black market led by a mysterious business magnate, and it is up to special agent Jinhan to recover it. Jinhan and his wife have drifted apart due to the secret nature of his work, and Jinhan is unaware that is wife is also a special agent who was tasked with protecting the painting.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Hong Kong has been synonymous with action movies for quite a while. The fast pace action, the interesting plotlines, all of these qualities make Hong Kong style action movies a thrill to watch. Moreover, with some of the top talent they can acquire such as Andy Lau of House of Flying Daggers fame, people may expect a good time with Switch. While people may thing they are walking into a good movie, especially considering the pedigree of Andy Lau, Switch reminds the audience that not even good talent can save a mess in progress.
The story of Switch acts as a good example of how to write up incoherent story. With Switch one wonders what the concept of the plot are throughout the whole entire story. The original plot bills itself as a story of a missing piece of artifact and Special Agent Xiao Jinhan mission to try and recover it for a secret agency. While this seem easy enough plot to follow the way the writer wrote to make things more interesting actually turned them incoherent. For instance, after a defeat in recovering the artifact, the Switch protocol is activated to cover up his identity after presumed dead. The concept of it doesn’t feel all that organically orchestrated or properly coherent in the first place because the lack of emotional gravitas of his death and the proper reason for the concept of the protocol in the first place. The concept of getting back the painting feel less and less important throughout the movie to the point where a certain scenes will have the audience wondering “ Wait a minute are there supposed to be something that were supposed to focus on?”, which the reply would be “Yes the painting”. This issue of incoherency also plagues the subplots which also interfere with the main storyline.
The subplots interfere with the main plot and overall just makes the whole story scene choppy and confusing. For instance one subplot is when Jinhan is having marital problems with his wife, Lin Yuyan, played by Zhang Jingchu. They try to show this discord throughout the movie, however you never get a sense of how bad are strain the relationship is. This issue can be seen when Jinhan talks about his allergic reaction to duck eggs, where the emotional weight does not follow the action and the resolution only makes the concept disposable. In fact it begs more questions as to how they were not aware of in the first place. The only sense of why they’re having issues or why it is deteriorated so much is because of Jinhan being too busy because of work, once again not really emphasized at all. Holes such as these are riddled in such a way that it makes the feel like a chore to watch.
The villains in Switch are only memorable because of how unmemorable and stereotypical they are. Yes, for most watchers they will say what villain or which one are you doing are you talking about because their memory of the villain would not be cohesive either. You have a stereotypical villains in a stereotypical fashion show they are stereotypically evil. For instance one of the villains when talking about the panting is eating sushi off of a girl’s body, in another scene Jinhan fights another villain with swords in a fire ring. All of these stereotypical doing things stereotypically happened in a stereotypical fashion in which the audience will just say meh, seen this before.
One of Switch’s main focuses, action scenes, are underwhelming. The problem is that they feel generic. Each one of the fights and methodologies on how they take out people may setup for epic moments, but instead peter out to mediocrity. It gets to a point where it may become predictable for movie fans, let alone action aficionados. This issue is especially disappointing because the action scenes are arguably the only times where the camera work, choreography and direction, actually work well.
The directing and editing were very underwhelming. The director failed to convey a lot of the emotional aspects of Switch such as the rifting between Jinhan and Lin, fails to convey the importance of the painting and fails to emphasize or clarify through a “show don’t tell” mechanic of the importance of the Switch protocol. Moreover, the camera angles, in a effort to come off as fast pace, actually come off as erratic, uncoordinated, and just plain confusing for most of the movie. Very few times does the pacing feel on target and only for a flight of a moment before switching to the next scene.
The acting was was hard to gauge. In that while Lau and Jingchu seem to say their lines the way the emotional aspect of the acting does not really resonate at all. In fact, a lot of emotional moments just feel contrived because of the writing and the actors, knowing this issue, try to do their best to try to work around issues. What comes out of this setup is just an okay performance overall. With that being said, once again it is hard to gauge the fact that these actors fulfilled their potential in their performance because the bad writing and direct. For many peplum they may get different feelings for the quality acting depending on how the movie comes off to them. For the vast majority of people it will be at average at best and disappointing at worst.
In Summary:
Switch is a messy story that will leave an unsatisfactory flavor in people’s mouths. Between the bad writing and the horrible directing, people will wonder if the acting were truly bad, or just mediocre (most will assume and probably be right about the latter). The action scenes, while may look great, just do not fulfill their potential. Switch itself, just does not fulfill its potential, and will be as memorable to readers as a goldfish’s lunch is to a goldfish.
Features:
English Language, Mandarin Language, English Subtitles, “Fate” Music Video, “Switch” Main Theme Music Video, Theatrical Trailer, Original Trailers
Content Grade: D
Audio Grade: C
Video Grade: C
Packaging Grade: C
Menu Grade: C
Extras Grade:
Released By: Giant Ape
Release Date:
MSRP:
Running Time: 112
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
Review Equipment:Dell
Dell 8X Serial ATA DVD+/-RW Drive
