Reviews

Steve McQueen did a breathtaking job bringing Jake Holman to life. For such a taciturn character, he was incredibly expressive and multi-dimensional, singular while not trying to make himself stand out, simple in motivation but had great capacity for tolerating complexity, unsocial but capable of deep loyalty to the people he connected with, but most of all, superbly cool and self-contained while intimately involved, uncontaminated by disdain and indifference. It is not everyday one sees a Hollywood flick with that level of character understanding and finely honed execution.

As a whole, I thought McQueen's character almost single handedly held the film together and kept audience interest going through several bad stretches. The film could have used some inspired editing, and the direction dragged precisely in places where briskness and suspense was called for. Nonetheless, it was a thoughtful treatment of the morass countries, races, individuals find themselves in when reality falls prey to politics, when battle lines get drawn, whether participants were willing or not. But do please ignore the simplification of the social and international context of China in 1929 in this film. That context alone would have taken a few more films if justice were to be done.

The film touched on the perennial lessons on international exploitation and identity politics in which fear becomes the social currency. The characters and events illustrated the moral slipperiness of race and identity, the falseness of political positions, the dangers of pressing self-indulgent social justifications (even when rightfully justified), and ultimately, the uselessness to which moral judgment can be rendered once power play encourage violence to escalate. Jake Holman's last words capped it all.

"What the hell happened?" Indeed! Violence and exploitation has a way of creating mob mentality which strip nations and individuals of sense, of discernment, of ability to evaluate complexity, and steering the masses into arbitrary and false positions regardless of the facts, regardless of what most people actually think and feel. Reduced to this game of extreme, the ruling mentality becomes "kill or be killed". McQueen embodied thoughtfully this dismay and ambivalence. Take heed, warmongers and pacifists alike.