Here comes a dark comedy movie from People's Republic of China with a not truly original story but some great images and a solid acting.
After the death of a coworker, his colleague and friend wants to fulfil his mate's last wish and bring his cadaver in his small home town that happens to be almost two thousand miles away. On his way through the big and diversified country, the man on his strange mission meets a lot of strange people such as philosophical thieves, heartbroken truck drivers, lonely but smart old men, bikers that are looking for freedom and fulfilment, cutthroat restaurant owners, desperate but cordial beggars and dutiful police officers before the movie ends with a little twist.
The movie has a lot of colourful characters and kicks off with the most funny and intriguing scenes in the bus and with a truck driver. After a strong start, the movie gets a little bit redundant now and then and has a couple of lengths. Even the good acting in this road movie can't help that the movie sometimes gets lost. In contrast to these lengths, the beginning and the ending of the movie are definitely too abrupt and lack of depth.
The movie doesn't centre around its weak plot but around true Chinese valours and the diversified cultures, landscapes and people. I though feel that this movie is once again slightly propagandistic and tries to dress an almost perfect image of the Chinese people even if there are also one or two bad boys to find. Every recent Chinese movie contains some proverbs and traditional songs. When you first see and hear this, it's exotic, intriguing and original but it gets a boring and pretentious trend. It's the same as if every second American film would include Christmas carols and mention the American Dream. It would get annoying after a while. This movie also contains too many proverbs and carols.
In the end, this movie is especially an interesting one for anybody that doesn't know that much about Chinese culture as one can discover a lot of cultural things about this amazing country in this movie. Anybody that is used to Chinese cinema won't discover anything new and apart of a very solid start, a very good acting and a well done romance towards the end, this flick remains quite average. It's worth to be watched once but nothing more in my humble opinion.
