Red Yawner (Red Corner (DVD))

Member Name: wampyrii

Product:	Red Corner (DVD)
Date:	08/03/02 (39 review reads)
Rating:

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Red Corner is one of those movies which has a big name in the lead role and made such an 'enormous' impact when it hit the screens that no one wil ever remember that it ever existed. I stumbled across it in the cheapo section of out local video store a year ago and was attracted to it simply by the name of the star and the fact that I had never heard of it until then.Of course, the combination of big name star and unknown movie ought to have been warning sign enough as to what was to come but I suppose I was intrigued. Seeing this making an appearance on satellite television recently I was reminded of just how bloody awful it was so perhaps with this review I can prevent some of you lot from the same horrible experience. Red Corner is quite simply a movie which has absolutely zero redeeming features others than to see how a talented crew can get things quite so wrong. It like the movie equivalent of a bad hair day for all concerned, it doesn’t matter what you do with it you can’t make it look good. In fact, think of any adjective you like to describe a really bad movie and Red Corner fits that billing admirably. It is quite honestly that bad!

Apparently the Chinese were a little miffed about tis movie coming out on the screens because its so critical of their legal sysytem. It also feature Richard Gere in a prime role which is another thorn in their side because he has been a vocal supporter of the exiled Dallai Lama in the past...but they needn’t have worried. In fact, they should have been laughing in the Communist halls of power because whatever point this movie was ever trying to make is given a heavy smack in the jaw by how awful the movie is. Chief offender is Gere himself who comes across as a talking plank throughout in his role of a businessman bringing Western imagery to the East. He’s upset someone in high places because after bringing a chinese girl back to his hotel room for a night of hankie pankie he finds hims
elf on the end of a set up. He awakes when the door to his room bursts open and finds the room awash with blood and the girl dead in the room with him. Bloodstained himself he is arrested and the case looks pretty much open and shut. Western lawyers are not allowed to practice in China and the overwhelming evidence against him means the American embassy has turned their back upon him so he is assigned a young female Chinese lawyer called Yuelin(Bai Ling) to represent him instead. Mistreated by his prison wardens and advised to plead guilty because the courts are far more lenient in such cases, Gere battles to clear his name against overwhelming odds.

Normally you can look at a bad movie and say that the bad points outweigh the good points but not with Red Corner. There are no good points to outweigh, and I mean that with all sincerity. Yes, of course its better than the very worse movies ever made, there is a little talent on display here when all is said and done, but for a major motion picture what it actually offers is unforgivably bad. Gere’s performance is totally abysmal and easily the worst I have seen him give in his entire career. I can’t say I’m much of a fan anyway, but here his performance is sub-Stephen Seagal in terms of emotion and about as believable as Chuck Norris. he is truly awful and its a movie the guy ought to be ashamed of. Unfortunately, this is a criticism which can be levelled at just about everyone else in the movie too, other than the unknown Bai Ling who at least gives a passable performance and one which sometimes borders upon being quite good, certainly she fits the part anyway and doesn’t overpplay like Gere does in every scene which demands a little emotion. He goes from plank, to nervous breakdown material in the blink of an eye, overplaying his part to the point where I laughed out loud on a few occassions. If there is anything at all good to say about this movie then its that Gere is so awful here
that you too may get some real belly laughs out of his performance.

You’d think watching this that it was the work of a new, not very talented director really struggling to learn the ropes and not succeeding. You might think that, but a quick squizz at the box, or the end credits and you’ll see that in fact the director is John Avnet who has brought us movies like Fried Green Tomatos At The Whistle Stop Cafe in the past which, whilst not to everyone’s taste, is actually a rather good movie and one which I found highly enjoyable. Drama is not something new to him but watching this you’d think he had never touched upon a drammatic movie before in his life. Nowhere does the drammatic element work in Red Corner, it always seems contrived, overtly manipulative and frankly highly unbelievable. The build up to the inevitable final court scenes is slow and laboureous and smattered with stupid scenes which simply do not work, or insult our intelligence such as the scene where a handcuffed Gere outruns the police by jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Stick a scene like that in a movie like Lethal Weapon and we’ll still groan about how dumb it is, shove it in a supposedly serious drama and its almost funny...but not quite. Red Corner tries to tell us that every Chinese person is subservient and two-faced, whilst every Westerner in the East is upto something and only out to line their own pockets, no matter who gets trampled on or killed in the bargain. There are two good guys in the whole region - Gere and Ling, swallow that and you’re a bigger fool than the people who commision this tripe. Cartoon bad guys abound here, and as everyone but the leading pair come across as being bad guys its very much like watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit with a dramatic theme, but without the entertainment value.

Perhaps the worst thing of all though is that this movie actually has a political agenda and is trying to highlight some of what is
wrong with the Chinese system. The agenda is obvious, so much so that is smacks you in the face constantly to the point where you feel like fighting back by reaching for the off switch, but the implementation of the ideas is so ludicrously bad that none of its points are transfered to the viewer. If its meant to be an expose of the Chinese legal system then its a hilariously bad one, if its meant to be a drama then it fails miserably by being horribly contrive and deeply wooden and if its meant to be something else then I really did miss the point. Red Square is totally awful, no, its not that good, words do not describe how bad this movie is.

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