It’s not about who draws their sword first but who can pretend they never in the first place…
Revenge and scandals are easy stories to write and tell. Good ones have a central villain and one who knows the whole story but no one else does. The best ones are where everyone’s angling for a piece of the cake. The Bold, The Corrupt, And The Beautiful is the latter but it’s not perfect. Like its plot, there’s a crack or two in the veneer. A land deal between the secretary of the leading party in Taiwan goes sour and one of the political families involved gets butchered for an infraction. Madame Tang (Kara Hui), the wife of a deceased army general, who was helping to make the deals involved gets dragged into a dangerous game of murder, counter-murder, deceit and more. But this kind of deal means someone has to come out on top and Madame Tang is determined to come out holding all the cards.
The film itself is a bit of a hot mess with some of the machinations of the Madame over the top. I mean, the police investigating political crimes are largely incompetent in real life and fiction but even then, there’s some level of professionalism. Here, actions by the Madame and her daughters would be noticed by the attention-hungry press if not the cops but no, she gets away with most of it. Also, without knowing anything about the players, we’re dropped in a lot of scenes where we’re told to cope and have a new character introduced who may not last until the end of that act. I wasn’t a fan of the cinematography (can’t stand flat-looking films with TV drama looks) at the start but it won me over by never wavering from its style.
The draw instead is the over the top melodrama with the fight not between the Madame and the cops but with her daughters. Tang Ning (Wu Ke-xi), an intoxicating beauty with a seriously damaged self-image problem, and Tang Chen (Vicky Chen) who has her own deeply disturbing psychological problems are pitted against each other and the world in their attempts to cover for their mother. Ning throws herself at every bottle and pill to blot out the fact she’s a glorified escort for her mother to hoover up recalcitrant players on the board while Chen is the pretty, well-mannered daughter who pours tea, listens to the adults plot the doom of others, and obsesses about the things she can’t have. When the three women’s needs hit each other, all hell breaks loose with people being kidnapped, murdered or broken.
All through it all is Madame Tang’s iron will and the fact that everyone will be made to see her point of view. I liked Kara Hui’s performance throughout and it’s her abilities that let me see that while I could be sympathetic to her plight at times, ultimately her drive to succeed was the reason why her kids are destroyed and at the end of the day, she truly is monstrous. Vicky Chen’s turn is the opposite side of Hui’s performance. Here, she is all emotion and little guile. Her need to have things her way might suggest how the Madame started out but later refined her tenacity. But the way she tilts her head and you can see an evil thought pass through her head is chilling. The person I was the most sympathetic to was Tang Ning. She looks into the mirror and sees, finally, that she can’t do this for her mother anymore. But the film’s explains in detail of how she destroys others for her mother and for her amusement. Her destruction is the price she must pay for doing her mother’s bidding. I liked how Wu Ke-xi takes the weak link in a crime family’s chain and showed the manner in which it must pay for breaking down in the course of its duties. She starts out haughty and seductive but by the end, just wants her soul back.
I liked how every bloke in the movie was an idiot who either is there to sign a check, be lured into bed, or swatted by money. This is a female-led film, either by the Tang family themselves or by the wives, friends, rivals, and female onlookers who populate the cast. While the cast does become a bit dizzy at times, I liked the thread throughout that showed this was a problem caused by women and would be solved by them (or one of them) by the end. It’s an excellent film showcasing Kara Hui at the centre of a largely female cast where she comes out as the most fleshed-out character despite not always being on screen. Highly recommended.
The Bold, The Corrupt, And The Beautiful is released in UK Cineworld Cinemas from 4 September 2020
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