2 out of 5

Directed by: Alan Yuen

When I first started watching Bollywood films – or rather the cinema of India – I understood there was a learning curve. That is, for a viewer raised on standard US fare, the style / tone of the movies were clearly different, and I would need to learn a bit more about that to properly assess the films in context. That said, assuming one is able to realize that such films are produced by and directed for a different culture than their own, the fact that there is that learning curve should be apparent; it’s almost like a different genre – learning to appreciate classical music when you’ve only ever listened to grindcore.

I’m not positive how many Chinese films I’ve seen. Lots of Japanese flicks, lots of Korean stuff, some Taiwanese movies, but… yeah. I’m lacking here. Not to mention that – obviously – not all films of an area are the same.

Within the first few seconds of 2019 Chinese actioner The Rookies, I realized there was going to be that learning curve. But even with that understanding, I wasn’t sure what I was watching. Porting actors from the US or elsewhere into foreign made films is as common as the opposite, but with Milla Jovovich popping up in the movie in action scenes aping a mixture of some of Milla’s film antics in later Resident Evil films with John Wick / Fast and the Furious ridiculousness mixed with some theatrical wire work, and the film’s cartoonish quick-cut edits and occasional blending of media (animated sequences, computer graphics sequences) tip-toeing across other cultural notes, I sensed that the makers / producers of The Rookies may not have been able to explain exactly what they were making either: is this a type of Chinese cinema, or something else? Rather, I’d guess that it’s a wide swing to try to nab as many audiences as possible, with that hop-skip cultural blender the result. If you’d guess that that makes the movie pretty messy – yes.

Zhao Feng (Wang Talu) does extreme something-or-other for online clout, such as climbing to the top of a building, filming it for his fans the whole while. A botched descent from a stunt lands him (slapstickily) in the middle of some type of high stakes exchange between ready-to-shoot-each-other bigwigs; Zhao is mistaken for a buyer in the exchange, a gaffe which is eventually covered up by the arrival of Bruce (Jovovich), a secret agent who’s trying to suss out the actual buyer. And now that Zhao is involved, obviously he’s the right choice to insert as an undercover and leader Bruce’s agency to the baddies.

The big-mouthed Feng is given his mission parameters and told to head to Budapest; he tells a friend who tells a friend, giving us the team of titular “rookies” who are all teamed up to track down the mysterious buyer, Bruce chiding them in their wake. Cue antics.

That there’s barely any effort to give the plot credence doesn’t have to matter, but The Rookies forgets to exactly establish the stakes, or the parameters of its world. As a giant generalization across other Asian cinema, there is a willingness to blend genres a lot more than US / UK films do, so the way The Rookies jumps from cartoonish slapstick to big budget spectacle isn’t a discredit; however, the lacking parameters to which I refer mean that it’s not clear if someone is just going to bounce back from getting shot or falling off a building, or how farcical or how exciting any given sequence is supposed to be. It all kind of falls into a stewed pot of doing everything at once, with the story so rushed that there’s no exact rhyme or reason to any given moment beyond justifying a set piece; you can only rely on momentum to carry you through.

On the one hand, this gives you so many moments that are wasted space just for a laugh or a visual; on the other hand, the trick mostly works thanks to a pretty effective splash of budget – while the cuts can be excessive, the action scenes are actually pretty zany and inventive, and the cast of rookies has an easy-going camaraderie that allows for a run of puerile gags to at least occasionally make you chortle, just by dint of being so dumb.

But otherwise: this is expensive emptiness, designed out the wahoo to entertain as globally broad an audience as possible, which can only misfire. Milla puts on a very embarrassing Bale Batman-like rasp and (I would guess due to some language barriers?) comes across as undirected in scenes, though you can tell she had some image of the character as a Matrix-y badass in her head and just tried to riff on that. It’s not a paycheck role for her, but I also can’t claim that she adds much, and the mixed-language nature of the film probably moreso distracting.

As to that last bit, I would like to be able to check out a subbed version of this. I could only find an English version for streaming, and though I don’t think the sub would change the rating, I know some of the physical humor would’ve landed better if not dubbed, and the repartee surely would’ve had a smoother flow. The English version that I’d guess is the commonly available one is, unfortunately, a bit lazy: on screen text isn’t translated, and there’s a sequence where I think the joke is that someone is translating Milla’s English into Zhao’s language, but because everyone is “speaking” English it just doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, I don’t really get what was going on with Milla in general – it seems like she’s also dubbed in some scenes. What?

Anyhow, perhaps there’s a future where I discover that The Rookies actually is representative of some part of Chinese cinema, and I can come back and better assess the movie on those terms. But all signs point to this being a real hodge-podge that has no chance of being more than passably distracting at best.