Schemes in Antiques (2021)

Don't be fooled. This is God Awful!

I'm an American who loved THE LAST EMPEROR. During Covid I needed shows I've never seen before. I gave RUYI'S ROYAL LOVE IN THE PALACE a shot and became not only enamored with Chinese dramas but OBSESSED. My desire to see this film was because 'Consort Jia' (Xin Zhi Lei of RUYI) is the lead, and because I think she is a global actress in the making -- I was willing to see ANYTHING with her in it.

I started this at night and was terribly excited. An hour into it (halfway point) my wife and I gave up. Here's why --

1. The genre here is INDIANA JONES. The problem is, and nobody seems to ever notice this, there has never been a sequel to that film worth seeing again. And those stupid MUMMY movies? Painfully bad. What made RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK great were the characters as much as the chase. This film is all chase --

2. -- zero characterization. The lead man? His Daddy abandoned him. Sounds good on paper but it wasn't SOLD to us. He needs to redeem his clan? Why do I care about that? The clans in this story were as voluminous as they were two dimensional cardboard cut outs. The good guys weren't really so good, the bad guys weren't really so bad. Yawn. The handsome guy from the other clan so failed as an adversary the story eventually turns him closer to a 'brother' as the Chinese put it. And if you don't believe me of how flat all these people were --

3. -- Xin Zhi Lei was put in this movie so that there was something pretty to look at. NOTHING ELSE. And despite the fact she is simply one of the most beautiful women in the world didn't make her the least bit compelling. Puddles after a drizzle have more depth. On top of this I sensed she may have been pregnant because for the most of the film she was wearing tents.

This film seemed so terribly familiar to Western eyes. When the first 'puzzle' turned out to be Morse code, I'm sorry, it just had to be the 100th time in my life I've seen Morse code appear as a big secret in a movie. Are you kidding? Couldn't come up with something better? Or frickin' NEW?!?!?

So I abandoned the film. But the next morning I had a spare hour with coffee and tried to finish. To the film's credit it never got any worse. What started with cliches ended with cliches. The worst of which is a big audience applauding our hero, to cue the audience to think something wonderful has happened. Except nothing did.

There was a story hiding in this film. It was the backstory with the Dad playing games with the boy. That element should have appeared a lot more as a B-story. The way SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE does so. Had they had actual characters they could have cut two thirds of the budget away.

It's kind of impossible to pick apart this story any further because of how painfully convoluted it was. I felt next to nothing after the first few minutes and before the last few minutes. The remaining film was a video game and nowhere near as clever as it thought it was.

If you disagree -- you're falling into the Western film 'blockbuster' trap. You're letting the production values trick you into thinking you saw something great. You didn't.

Look, like I said, I'm obsessed with Chinese media now. I've seen lots of HYPER LOW BUDGET mainland China films that were shot for $20 and clearly lack career actors. YouTube offers tons of them for free.

I just saw one about a crippled girl who cuts red paper out and accidentally creates a potential industry for her poor village. She wasn't much of an actress but -- for 90 minutes -- they managed to keep the viewer watching. It's pathetic that movie was better than this, but that's not my fault.

Any episode of RUYI'S ROYAL LOVE IN THE PALACE blows either film out the water.

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