DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME (Hong Kong, 2010)
Directed by: Tsui Hark
Starring: Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Tony Leu Kar-fai, Li Bingbing, Deng Chao

He’s back! After fifteen difficult years, Tsui Hark returns to greatness with DETECTIVE DEE, the 50th movie from his company, Film Workshop, and it heralds a return to the days when Hong Kong movies meant speed, madness, entertainment, spectacle, strong women, tragic heroes, cynical politics, kinetic action and kung fu deer. Wu Zeitan (Carina Lau), China’s only female empress, is about to be coronated and she’s celebrating as only a Chinese empress can: by building a massive, towering, statue of herself as the Buddha. And when we say massive, we mean that this thing could dangle the Statue of Liberty on its knee. But, as Jay-Z observed, there are a lot of haters out there and court officials are spontaneously combusting, bursting into CGI flames before the eyes of horrified bystanders. It’s destabilizing the regime and spreading panic and terror everywhere. Chances for a hassle-free coronation? 50% and falling.

Not-quite Empress Wu figures that a problem this knotty requires a nuclear solution and so she orders disgraced official, Dee Renjie (superstar Andy Lau), released from prison where she put him eight years ago for opposing her upgrade from Empress Consort (wife of the emperor) to Empress Regent (ruler in everything but name). Detective Dee comes out of prison looking like a giant hairball but before long he’s cleaned up, wearing phallic hats and applying his big brain to the mystery of the Phantom Flame. Then: giant, killer marionettes.

Action choreography is by last year’s Star Asia Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Sammo Hung, and it’s bruising, fantastic stuff. But it’s Carina Lau, turning in a career-best performance as the Empress, that transforms this movie into Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Equal Rights Amendment. The Empress and her favorite servant, the whip-wielding Jing’er (played to lethal perfection by Li Bingbing), are two women facing a world that hates them because they wear lipstick. With traitors lurking in every shadow and deathtraps in every room, Detective Dee is two-fisted pulp entertainment with a timeless message: it’s a man’s world and women have to find a way to survive in it.