Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

Another unreal policeman.

Must I summarise the plot? Well, people keep bursting into flames. Noone knows what is causing this, but foul play is suspected. Find Detective Dee, the omniscient chop-socky protagonist and the game of Gomoku is afoot. It’s important not to obfuscate the main issue, which is that Detective Dee is a couple of hours of solid, uncomplicated entertainment. It has a strong central character, a fun plot, with plenty of twists, lots of fighting, plus a sprinkling of magic. It also features a world record - surely the largest ever murder weapon. It is excellent fun.

One aspect of the film which I found puzzling, however, was that it had one foot in the rational scientific world, and another in the supernatural. Of course, it’s a staple element of detective literature for a supernatural explanation to be posited for a phenomenon (The Hound of the Baskervilles), only for the rational detective to demonstrate the all-too-human origin for the events in question.

In Detective Dee, supernatural events occur alright, but the ‘rational’ explanations are not rational at all: for example, the ability to ventriloquise over long distances - an obvious impossibility - is an explanation for one of the minor mysteries of the film. In another scene, the ability of a character to seemingly split into three parts is explained by... puppetry? Hm. Hardly believable either. 

It seems that the Chinese have misunderstood one of the key elements of the detective genre: part of the ludic quality of the western detective story is the idea that the reader, or viewer in this case, is able to piece together the available evidence, and come to the conclusion before the detective. Western detective writers are tightly constricted by the confines of the possible, or even the likely. To reveal, at the end of a Holmes story, that there really was  a phantom hound would be deeply unsatisfactory. In Detective Dee world, the supernatural is also debunked, but only for a physical world in which pretty much anything is possible. Dee occupies an alternate reality, one where modern natural science has not arrived, but in which primitive inventions, such as martial arts, homeopathy, mechanics, ventriloquism (to name a few examples) have been honed to a degree bordering on the supernatural. 

This state of affairs has plausibility-sapping properties. Characters are omniscient one moment, but lacking a fatal piece of information the next. One second they can sense a footstep from half a mile away, the next, they are snuck up on by thirty foot soldiers. And of course, when almost anything is possible, the actual becomes less interesting. 

I don’t actually think that the Chinese have misunderstood the detective genre. I think they have grafted it onto another genre: the fantasy kung fu genre. The resulting chimera is an odd-looking beast which wouldn’t be allowed in any classical detective club, but nevertheless entertains in its own way.

Metaphysical Policemen

There’s always a metaphysical element to detectives - an investigation going on behind the investigation. That’s true for TV cops as much as for fictional ones. You wouldn’t assume Columbo had a pretext, but then, is it a coincidence that Columbo villains are always part of an elite - an intellectual, financial or social elite? Colombo represents the working man - rough hewn, unintellectual, but underestimate him at your peril. Columbo represents the forces of democratisation in American society. The worst crime in the US is to believe that you are better than everybody else. Colombo proves that. The villains in Columbo demonstrate that if you go around thinking you’re better than everyone else, it’s only a matter of time before you actually commit a murder. It’s also no coincidence that it’s often British or European actors playing the villain. Europe is elitist, effete, decadent.: Ricardo Montalban; Patrick McGoohan. America is manly, pragmatic. In Columbo, you know who the killer is, because you see the Crime at the beginning of the show. It’s not so much a detective show, as a blood sport. It’s watching the ritual humiliation of a public monster. 

What is the metaphysical element of Inspector Montalbano (no relation to Ricardo), currently on BBC iPlayer? Inspector Montalbano demonstrates all the qualities of Italianicity that an Italian man should posess: boisterously heterosexual, a gastronome, yet cuts a bella figura despite all that pasta. To a British person, Montalbano seems to play fast and loose with the code of professional conduct which you would expect from an officer of the law. He is more interested in Justice, than law, and doesn’t believe in observing every little regulation, because he sees the bigger picture. He frequently exercises a worldly discretion in the course of his duty, as opposed to sticking to the letter of the law. Montalbano whines like a baby when his superiors threaten to promote him. A promotion would mean a desk job, and more responsibility. Montalbano isn’t interested in worldly position. He’s interested in staying proletarian, because authority is for buffoons. How can Montalbano buck authority if he is one? Despite resembling the love child of Karl Pilkington and Ross Kemp to a precise degree, Montalbano is a hit with the ladies, another Italian manly requisite. I’m learning Italian hand gestures. Two hands held in an inverted steeple at waist level seems to mean ‘you’re fucking joking’ or ‘give me a break’. The hands can be pulled apart then for an imploring gesture ‘have mercy’. Montalbano may be a good and honest cop, but the virtues he displays are arguably the biggest problem with Italy’s political and judicial system. If you believe that a cop should be allowed to exercise personal discretion (“you understand these things” says an aged mafia boss in one episode), then you are subordinating the law to another code: the code of mercy, the code of criminals, the code of ‘decency’. In practice, I would place little reliance on such codes to regulate society. Am I a conservative? I only ever saw Columbo let someone off once: she had alzheimers, and had forgotten she committed the crime. If I were a murderer, I would want Montalbano to arrest me. I think he’s quite bribable.

Safehouse with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds

Even dumb Hollywood movies are noticeably smarter these days.

Whilst it is still true that a computer can’t create a piece of art, the current prevalence of scriptwriting programs  mean that, even if you are watching the worst kind of cinematic pabulum, in which the only object seems to be to create enough plausibility to move from one action set-piece to another, you can be certain that a spurious thematic depth lurks in the background: each character has their own backstory and motivation, however half-heartedly it is developed.


Welcome to the 90s

In Safehouse, a film in which the only unpredictable element is just how predictable it is, we are invited to a mid-nineties action-movie retro party. The plot is reminiscent of every straight-to-video action movie you’ve ever seen, from the 90s. It looks like it was directed by Tony Scott, in the 90s, but wasn’t, but has his penchant for shaky cameras and pointless captions like “11:43am, Washington”, which I thought Team America: World Police would have put a stop to. It even stars, alongside the charisma-free Ryan Reynolds, that old 90s action standby, Denzel Washington.


Who the hell is Ryan Reynolds anyway? I sure as hell didn't order him. He's another one of those pre-packaged stars that come up every couple of years, seemingly already famous before they have done a decent movie. Before long, you can't move without hearing about who they are dating, or how much they are making per movie, but you still, for the life of you, can't name one decent movie they have made. It's like Brad Pitt. He's a walking advertisement for Brad Pitt, but no good at anything else. 

The first 30 minutes or so of Safehouse are actually pretty good. Denzel Washington is one of the best actors on the action circuit. He actually reminds us that 'action' has the verb 'act' in it. He has 3 or 4 facial expressions to Ryan Reynolds 1.   Sadly, it is in these 30 minutes that the film runs through its entire premise and out the other side. That premise is that Ryan Reynolds (CIA, first job) finds himself guarding Denzel Washington (veteran, ex CIA) in a Safehouse in Johannesburg. But the safehouse is compromised, and soon they are under siege from armed hitmen. It’s no surprise that the heroes escape somehow, but, like Wile E. Coyote bursting through a door conveniently placed on the top of an Arizona mesa, the film finds itself running on thin air from that point, and, once it realises this, it takes a sharp plummet to a  foreseeable conclusion.

It's dire, it's cliched, but what annoyed me most was, as I suggested at the outset, the cynical attempt to bring depth into an otherwise shallow film, by implying there was more going on between the characters than there actually was. In Safehouse, Reynold’s character, “Matt” has an elder mentor in the CIA, Brendan Gleeson.

Now I like Brendan Gleeson. Good guy. But you’ve heard of good actors ‘phoning in’ a performance; when I say that here, I don’t just mean he’s hacking it. I also mean that Gleeson is literally on the phone for the whole of this movie, saying things like, “don’t worry, we’re coming to get you”. I'd really like to know what he got paid for this. Just out of interest.  

A piece of backstory about Matt is casually dropped early in the movie. You gotta love action films: they can just provide background for a character by a CIA boss shouting: “What have you got on X?” and then an underling, with a headset on, goes: “born 1981, raised by penguins in the wild, scored off the charts in blubbing like a baby and smashing up cars.” (So many people score ‘off the charts’ in CIA-themed action movies that you can’t help thinking, "Why don’t they have bigger charts?")

Matt’s father, we learn, died when he was young. Drink driving. Hmm, absent and irresponsible. Could Matt be in need of a father figure? What about Brendan Gleeson? or wait a minute, what about Denzel Washington? It was at this sort of quandary that the writers of Safehouse parked the script, deciding that was about enough depth to fool the audience into thinking this was somehow meaningful subtext. But, and this is just an idea, in order for Brendan Gleeson to have been a plausible father figure, he and Reynolds would probably have had to share a scene or two, perhaps even in the same room, rather than on the phone. Merely because of his physical proximity, there was distinctly more potential in Denzel Washington as father figure, and what an irony that would be, because he's supposed to be the one Matt is taking into custody. I think that this could have been the whole point of the movie, but the director missed it.

Sadly, Matt and Denzel are too busy being shot at and driving like crazy to take up the offer of a surrogate father/son relationship. Besides, that would kind of remind the audience that Denzel is Getting Too Old for this Shit. Despite the fact that neither of these relationships is implied in any meaningful way, in the end, it is annoying that, like a drunk absent father that tries to make up for the childhood he missed, the film tries in the end to cram the replacement father theme into the last two minutes, in some desperate bid for the audience's affection. But the audience instinctively rejects this late attempts to play on affections. Instead it laments: “Where were you when I needed you?”