Shanghai Surprise

 Saw Shanghai Surprise (thanks, Lea!)  It was a strange little throwback of a movie.  Set in the 30s in Shanghai, it seems to have been written then as well.  The plot is a fairly frothy MacGuffin-chase in an exotic locale starring a roguish, down-on-his-luck tie salesman and an uptight missionary girl.  They visit unspeakable opium dens, and rub shoulders with the hoi polloi at night clubs.  This is the bread and butter of Humphrey Bogart, but alas this film stars Sean Penn (the Shia LaBeouf of the 80s) and Madonna who does what she can but is very much a sexy, hot mess crammed into a tight-laced role.  The film is fast, full of double-crosses, feels about 30 years too late and fairly racist.

The film is clearly shot on location without much effort to age the locale, which adds another layer of strangeness.  Beautiful, crumbling slums and neon lights peak in the background as Asian actors do their level best with lines that have them referring to themselves in the third person and using mystic euphemisms to talk about tits ("twin pagodas.")  The racial attitudes are also sadly retrograde.

There's a weird hand-based theme in the film.  The main villain has his hands blown off fairly early and replaces them with what looks like two gigantic porcelain hands.  Madonna's missionary lady works for the helping hands mission, one lady is tortured by having her fingernails removed, and one gangster agrees to divulge information only in exchange for the American secret to the Knuckle-ball pitch.  This last bit of handy-business underscores, again, how very outdated this film feels.  Why is this gangster obsessing over baseball pitched?  Why does Sean Penn just happen to be a good ball player?  Why are there no good baseball players in Shanghai??

The plot of the film is okay, but I have a hard time getting excited about an opium/jewel/sacred treasure hunt.  There's supposed to be a slow-burn romance between Penn and Madonna but it's so foregone (look at her!) that it feels inevitable, not a will-they-or-wont-they situation but a when-will-they-finally-get-around-to-it kind of thing.

A strange film, seemingly transported from the 50s or so.  It does nothing to update the script for modern (even by 80s standards) racial sensibilities.  There's no good Asian characters, only variably reliable ones.  In the beginning, Penn tells Madonna to get on a rickshaw.  She balks at this, feeling like it's dehumanizing.  By the end of the film though, this fig-leaf has blown away and she's jumping on  and off rickshaws like no tomorrow, as Sean casually flips a coin for them to scramble over.  Not an outright unwatchable film, but yeesh.