‘Weekend In Taipei’ is a cliched action flick
Weekend In Taipei – written and produced by Luc Besson – has its bright moments, but is weighed down by excessive cliches and a convoluted plot. Directed and co-written by George Huang, the film delivers on the action front but falls short everywhere else.
The story opens with villain Kwang (Sung Kang), the leader of an eponymous seafood enterprise Kwang Enterprises, under scrutiny for unethical business dealings. His wife, Joey (Gwei-Lun Mei), is forcibly married to him for protection and in the interest of her son, Raymond, who despises Kwang. Across the world is John (Luke Evans), an undercover DEA agent, whose cover is blown and renders his six months of work moot. After receiving an anonymous email claiming they have the ledger of Kwang Enterprises with proof of drug dealing, John sets off to Taipei – without his boss's permission – to persecute Kwang himself.
John's introduction is him post-fight in a bloodied shirt, holding a glass of water with a fish in it. We work backward from there as he explains his situation to the police; His cover as a pastry chef was blown in front of the very drug dealers he was trying to persecute, and he fended off assailants with a frying pan and other kitchen tools. When one man was burned, he ran into the main restaurant and plunged into the fish tank, which was shattered by bullets and flooded the room. John saved a singular fish in a humanist, sympathetic gesture. The creative choreography marks the fight as the film's best – an early peak to hit – but the scene also evinces the backward storytelling structure frequently and detrimentally employed in Weekend In Taipei.
When John collides with Joey and Raymond his past comes crashing back into him; 15 years earlier he and Joey fell in love while he was undercover as a smuggler and had a messy split when he revealed his true identity. The love triangle of John and Joey, and Kwang's unrequited love for Joey and hatred for John, is the story's weak emotional core. John and Joey's long-simmering feelings for one another are communicated in flickering flashbacks and longing glances at photographs, with little else backing it up. Their actual history is not shared until much later when Joey explains it all to her son.
This expositional device is tiring at best and disruptive at its worst. The film loses its steam past the midway point when dedicating more time to extended flashbacks than furthering its actual plot. This is paired with abysmal dialogue that worsens when engaging in quippy comedy. Comedy is peppered throughout from the very beginning but in a way that is, again, rather disruptive. Little wink-wink moments that deflate the emotion from drama, like cutting to a couple fighting John's kitchen fight, or the numerous remarks characters make mid-fight. And then there's the in-between unintentional comedy where situations are so absurd yet tonally serious, such as Raymond holding John at gunpoint and then delivering a monologue on his and Joey's first meeting.
Luke Evans gets to shine in his action moments, but Gwei Lun Mei and Sung Kang are left in the dust with little else to do other than deliver their stale dialogue. It's fun seeing Evans and Kang duke it out in a hand-to-hand combat reckoning, but its stakes lack real intensity. At the story's conclusion, Joey, Raymond, and John's burgeoning familial relationship is the center point, and the entire Kwang Enterprises takedown wraps up in an overly neat bow. Weekend in Taipei mishandles its mixing of genres and ends up a poorly written, occasionally entertaining film
