At night, a crumbling museum guarded by well-meaning, but hapless security guards, stands alone on a deserted street in Chongqing, China. It’s the perfect target for thieves, as the flimsy defenses stand to protect an unbelievably rare jade stone on display at the museum.
The irreverent lunacy of “Crazy Stone” is apparent at this moment: the thieves prepare their plans of attack and director Ning Hao lets the soundtrack take over. It’s “Dance des cygnes” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, done by slithering electric guitars with an angry dissonance. As shown in Woody Allen’s “Scoop”, the playful melody puts the audience at ease, indicating that there’s sneakery and trickery afoot done with disgusting electric instruments, it’s irregular and shaky, a moment of pure snort and contempt.
Naturally, the music indicates what we can already guess: the thieves are as incompetent as the guards, and “Crazy Stone” delights us with 90 minutes of floundering around, launching half-baked plans and generally mucking things up.
Western audiences should find “Crazy Stone” amusing enough, although it feels like we’ve seen this before. Yes! Yes, we have Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch” already tickled us with the idea of useless thieves and things gone wrong, and “Crazy Stone” borrows more tricks from Ritchie’s celebrated Mockney feast.
Without any strong female roles in the film, it’s completely devoid of any sustained gender commentary; “Crazy Stone” decides, then, to paint a world where men are completely useless. Even the ‘Master Thief’, hired from Hong Kong, gets amusingly trapped by unfortunate events, allowing the coarse Northern Chinese thieves to play at theft.
The film was an unmitigated success in China, where it made millions, despite only costing $400 000, and had a pleasant reception overseas. This suggests that there might be a flourish of Chinese films to replicate successful Western movies for the domestic market, ensuring the big, big money.
Hopefully, this will progress to the point where there’ll be a Chinese remake of “The Departed”, and it will do exceedingly well, prompting Chinese studios to make “The Departed 2”, which will, ideally, get remade with Will Smith and a talking CGI dog.
“Crazy Stone” is amusing enough, however, and no amount of cynicism on my part should dissuade viewers from seeing the latest Chinese comedy. To his credit, Ning Hao has trimmed away all the excess, leaving the film fast and, some might suggest, even remarkably furious.
See it for
Guo Tao plays the lead guard, a former police detective, and he sells the entire movie on his performance, allowing the rest of the cast to act like deranged, drunken baboons, which they accomplish with glee.
Fun fact:
Director Ning Hao also made “Mongolian Ping Pong”, similar in sense of comedy, but much less frantic.
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