Rating: C+
Dir: Liu Pujun
Star: Martin Zhang, Ao Lei, Su Jing, Alexandre Robillard
“Pangolins appear in the food court.” That’s a line here, though it feels closer to half of a recognition code exchanged between Cold War secret agents. This is one where I really had to work hard. The hardcoded English subs were in four-point font and vanished into any light background. The soft subs were out of sync. The audio stopped entirely on multiple occasions. And the English language performances sounded like they were generated by a first-generation speech to text program. Yet, there’s something oddly charming here, which kept my interest. It likely starts with this being the first giant killer pangolin movie I’ve seen. Yet it’s sympathetic to them too – as much victim as monster.
Mind you, what else would you expect except dodgy behaviour from a company called “Tinder Biological Technology.” I don’t know about you, but I’d be reluctant to buy my giant pangolins from a company named after a hook-up app. They have been creating genetically modified animals, but their two pangolins of unusual size escape, and start wreaking havoc. The company’s minions are on the trail, and so is biologist Song Nan (Zhang). His ex-wife Zhou Qian (Ao) works for TBT, under evil corporate overlord Samuel (Robillard), and isn’t happy about it. Their adorable little moppet, Xiaoting, ends up in the creatures’ underground lair (I’m not entirely sure how, to be honest), and this is where things go a bit different, because she befriends one of them (top).
The bits of this I could understand are not bad. However, I’d likely put the amount as not much more than thirty percent, and this largely consists of the giant pangolin attack sequences. These creatures are quite effective, capable of attacking in a number of ways, from both ends and in the middle. There’s one scene where a giant snake (source uncertain) attemps to get involved, and is shredded in short order, which may be a slight diss on other genre entries. Yet there’s a strong ecological thread here, with Song reading Beauty and the Beast to his daughter. At the end, Xiaoting asks her father, “Is my pangolin friend a prince, too?” and we’re told, “Every species has a prince with a heart of gold.”
If the high-concept stuff is decent, there’s a lot that doesn’t manage to make any impact. Song’s relationship with Zhou is unconvincing, and Samuel’s performance as a corporate head appears to be carved from a large block of cheese wrapped in ham. There are times where stuff happened, that I just had to assume made sense, such as the subplot involving TBT’s parent corporation, Olympus. At another point, a pangolin appeared to become highly caffeinated after being injected. That’s not something I’ve seen before, and I suspect will likely be a while before I see it again. Perhaps in a better presented version, I’d have appreciated it better. As is, I was hanging on by my fingertips for more of this than I’d like.
This review is part of our feature, When Chinese Animals Attack.