Set Up — movie review
This Set Up is missing the instructions
I remember talking to a friend from Hong Kong a few years ago. I spoke to her about Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. She asked me, “Why do you watch Chinese films? They are garbage. Even I don’t watch my own country’s films.” I tried to reason with her, saying I’d just seen In the Mood for Love and I thought Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung were quite capable actors and Kar-Wai’s resume was quite impressive. She would hear none of it, and told me I was wasting my time.
Christy Chung (Bride with White Hair 2, Samsara) plays Moon, a horror author who undergoes lasik surgery two weeks before the date for her wedding. Due to complications during the surgery, Moon is left effectively blind for the seventy-two hours following the operation. (My boss, when I worked for a hosting company a year back had a similar problem. They did not get the prescription quite right for one of her eyes, and it was roughly a week before she got used to it.). To help her through the transition he sister, Yan, offers to stay at Moon’s Ikea furbished house until she regains her sight. That night, Moon retires to the basement, and her sister to the main floor, only to be set upon by a trio of robbers, leaving it up to the blind Moon to save the day. From here on out the film liberally borrows plot elements and action set pieces from Panic Room, Jennifer 8, and many other, better suspense films.
Penned by Wong Jing, the man responsible for Naked Weapon (with Maggie Q) and the Raped by an Angel series, this film is decidedly lack in logic. Make that, incredibly so. While I enjoyed the absurdity of the aforementioned Naked Weapon, some of the sequences in Set Up rival the ending to Spielburg’s The War of the Worlds. For example, how exactly would a blind woman be able to string about an intricate Home Alone style trap using ceiling anchored fishing line, or hide in the bubbles of a bath that had been drawn the previous night? However, since Wong Jing churns out more scripts, and directs more films per year than Japan’s Miike, I guess it is to be allowed he has little time to verify the logistics of his plots.
The visual style of the film is nothing to write about either. Through cinematographer Joe Chan’s perpetually dutched camera we watch the increasingly preposterous action unfold. Either he is a big fan of Battlefield Earth, or he skimped on his tri-pod. Kinetic scenes, such as the firing of a harpoon look interesting, but prove diamonds in the rough. Similarly, director Billy Chung (The Assassin) guides the actors through their paces, but none really give a noteworthy performance. Despite their actions the robbers come across as non-threatening, and Moon and Yan never really seem that deeply in danger.
Finally, there’s the star of the film. Admittedly Christy Chung is not known to be a particularly capable actress. As such, it is a shame that her primary draws are not utilized in this film. Dressed in ever so trendy Abercrombie cotton exercise pants (read: overpriced blue sweatpants), her face framed by the unforgivable nastiness of bangs, she is reduced to a homely matron, exuding none of the self confidence of her post-pregnancy photo-book/video Feel, or even the silly-sexy playfulness of Fantasia. Not helping the matter is the fact she spends the majority of the film in bed–not entirely unlike Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween II, resulting in a particularly uninteresting exercise for Chung fans.
In closing, though definitely not as bad as some of its Chinese contemporaries, Set Up is truly a bad film. The Lasik surgery storyline could have been used to a truly terrifying effect, but Wong Jing repeatedly fumbles the ball. If you’re a Christy Chung fan, there are plenty other films to see before this one. If not, Panic Room or Wait until Dark should suffice.
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