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Goddess of Mercy Reviews

2003
1 hr 50 mins
Action & Adventure
NR

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As Goddess of Mercy begins, Yang Rui (Liu Yunlong) is a callow womanizer in Beijing. He's always looking for action, which eventually leads him to An Xin (Vicki Zhao), who works at the local tae kwon do school. The more she spurns him, the more adamant he becomes. One rainy night, he goes too far, grabbing for her as she tries to enter her home, and she delivers a roundhouse kick to his head. He wakes up in her apartment, and apologizes to her. An Xin won't talk about her past. They begin a fragile courtship. He learns that she has a young son. A jealous ex gets wind of his new relationship, and arranges to have him brought up on embezzlement charges. An Xin helps him get out of jail, but then runs run off, leaving a long note. The film flashes back to An Xin's past as a gung-ho policewoman engaged to a journalist, Tienjun (Chen Jianbin). Assigned to a dangerous and remote district, she was forced to spend months away from him. Eventually, she met a brash young man, Mao Jie (Hong Kong heartthrob Nicholas Tse), and the two had a brief affair. Later, on a drug sting, she found out that Mao was a criminal. She took part in a deadly raid to bring down his family. An Xin reunited with Tienjun and they were married, after which she found out she was pregnant. Mao was released from prison and took vengeance. An Xin has left town because she believes that she's a destructive force, but Yang sets out to find her. Based on a popular novel by Hai Yan, Goddess of Mercy was directed by Ann Hui and had its U.S. premiere at the 2004 New York Asian American International Film Festival.

Reviewed By: Josh Ralske

With the fine genre-bending artistry of Goddess of Mercy, veteran Hong Kong director Ann Hui strengthens her position as one of the great underappreciated directors (at least in the West) of recent decades. Like many of her earlier films, including Visible Secret, Goddess of Mercy freely mixes genres, incorporating elements of crime drama, romantic comedy, and melodrama into a surprisingly cohesive and consistently entertaining whole. Hui tends to put an emphasis on strong characterizations. Here, solid work by the lovely Vicki Zhao (So Close) in a surprisingly tough role enhances the film's slowly building emotional power. Gorgeously shot in subdued hues, Goddess of Mercy is as visually impressive as the best big-budget filmmaking, and unusually adventurous. While there's a degree of predictability to the storyline once An Xin (Zhao) becomes involved with bad boy Mao Jie (Nicholas Tse), Hui (working with a script by Ivy Ho, who also wrote her previous film, July Rhapsody) never lets the audience get too far ahead of the story, and the plot's final outcome is in doubt until the very end. Liu Yunlong does a great job embodying Yang Rui's spiritual journey over the course of the film. Like Kathryn Bigelow in the U.S., Hui is a talented woman filmmaker who doesn't shy from wrenching free of genre expectations, and who refuses to be pigeonholed. At its core, Goddess of Mercy is a melodrama, but it's melodrama the way it should be done, with its visual splendor, its toughness, and its emotional honesty.