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Short of having the Warner Bros. logo at the start, and Humphrey Bogart walk on screen and say ‘Play it again, Chan,’ ‘Shanghai’ is the closest thing to an oriental version of ‘Casablanca’ in colour and widescreen as you’re likely to get. The surprising thing is that it pretty much works, on its own deliberately pulpy level, and even manages to pack some genuine emotion into its final section and must-make-the-last-ship-out finale,” Variety veteran Derek Elley writes in a Film Business review out of the Shanghai Film Festival, where Mikael Hafstrom’s long-delayed World War II thriller finally turned up last week, more than two years after it was shot.
“The central plot doesn’t really manage to combine the main character’s personal and professional quests, and some interesting side characters get beached by the tight editing; but while it’s running on screen, Shanghai doesn’t bore for a second,” continues Elley.
That seems like a polite way of saying that like Steven Soderbergh’s “Casablanca”/”The “Third Man” homage “The Good German” with George Clooney, this Weinstein Co. epic will likely not get strong enough reviews to find much of an audience in North America despite a high-powered cast including John Cusack, Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat.
Still, that’s a better assessment than many of us expected of “Shanghai,” which was originally slated for release during the 2008 awards season by the Weinsteins’ then-distributor of their major films, MGM, and postponed again after a planned bow over Labor Day weekend last year.
I haven’t been able to find any other reviews of “Shanghai” or box-office numbers out of China, where the film opened last week. The embattled Harvey Weinstein touched down briefly in Shanghai for the premiere, leaving before a prominent Chinese filmmaker called him “a cheater.” (Hat tip: Peter Nelhaus).