Weekend in Taipei
Weekend in Taipei
The Weekend in Taipei poster describes the film as “From the creator of Taken and The Transporter.” Quite another way of saying Luc Besson, who also co-wrote the two smashes with Robert Kamen, is this film’s screenwriter Luc Besson as well.
This time however the man’s co-writer is the film’s director George Huang who seems a bit of an inappropriate choice since he last directed television in 2007, episodes of American Heiress. The last time he was credited as a writer was for the dreaded mock sequel Hard Target 2, which came out in 2016.
In Taipei, mobster-wannabe Kwang (Sung Kang, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) is about to be put on trial. It’s because at the reporters he had called and tried to entertain, whom he had then kept like a dove, began to sound the reporters hostile to him began to sound their curious kind of phrases and in his mouth aimed their curious kind of phrases like He was innocent, trying to achieve learning at display reporters’ stands at He was innocent. Chiu, on the other hand, is out shopping for a new Ferrari when her husband also manages to procure one. After a suitably fast test drive around Taipei’s city streets, of course.
While stationed in Minneapolis, Agent John Lawlor (Luke Evans, One Lives, of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies) is on the verge of losing his six months of undercover work when his partner’s undercover assignment is discovered. There is a drug bust but it wasn’t enough to draw the lines to his primary target, Kwang, whom he has been after so much. In exchange for such incompetence, he is made to go on a holiday.
Even if the film wasn’t called Weekend in Taipei, you could probably guess that’s why Lawlor is going on holiday. And he arrives just in time, Joey’s teenage son Raymond Wyatt Yang has just made off with Kwang’s book of finances. It is rather ironic as the fronts for smuggling he varied use like other seafood businesses led to the killings of a large number of dolphins.
The only direction the story could’ve been any clouded is in the relationship between Lawlor and Joey where that cut turns out to be Raymond’s father and the naive looking boy turns out to be Raymond himself. As a matter of fact, they do, and he is. Weekend in Taipei is really everywhere, it’s just too low for me for an action movie. In and of itself, that’s not too bad in a film like this, as long as the action scenes deliver it works.
That’s unfortunately clear from the moment they begin from the very beginning of the season. The pictures of the Ferrari taking corners at speed are lovely but as it is a test drive instead of a chase, there is no excitement. On the other side, the match in the restaurant with Lawlor in it is the type of crazed fighting that Jackie Chan has executed for many years now. Too many bad men, too much kitchen utensils used, done all before.
The one sequence in the movie that is a straight cliche, is a wonderfully bizarre tribute to Breakfast at Tiffany’s where Joey resembles Audrey Hepburn with Moon River playing in the background. It’s attractive, but does nothing of substance as well.
The fights and car chases are all staged convincingly, but they do not present anything that feels creative or original. Which one can hardly expect when you stuff your film with Fast and Furious actors and paste The Transporter on the poster; some very good fast paced chase sequences are apparently a necessity to live up to those impressions that the forced marketing gives. Those in Weekend in Taipei are about the parallels of what you would get out of a DTV action movie.
And, irrespective of the presence of Besson and despite the film playing in multiple territories, that is exactly what Weekend in Taipei is. A decent weekend action movie which is made directly for streaming and which you will possibly watch in a weekend when there is none interesting to hit the theaters. It wouldn’t put you to sleep but it wouldn’t captivate you either.
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- Genre: Action, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: George Huang
- Cast: Luke Evans, Sung Kang, Lun-Mei Gwei
