Saving Mr. Wu (2015)

Mr. Wu, a Hong Kong movie star, is kidnapped by four unpredictable criminals disguised as police officers. Will he get rescued?

Director:

Sheng Ding

Writers:

Sheng Ding, Sheng Ding

Stars:

Andy Lau, Ye Liu, Qianyuan Wang

7 wins & 6 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Andy Lau	...	Mr. Wu
Ye Liu	...	Xing Feng
Qianyuan Wang	...	Zhang Hua
Ruofu Wu	...	Cao Gang
Xiaorui Zhao	...	Zhang Yi
Peng Lu	...	Li Zhidui
Lu Cai	...	Xiao Dou
Suet Lam	...	Mr. Su
Meng Li	...	Chen Chen
Wei Na	...	Cheng Zong
Ailei Yu	...	A Cang
Xu Yang	...	Guo Zi
Zheng Wang	...	Chao Ge
Li Longjun	...	Sun Shengli
Sichun Ma	...	Liu Yun

Storyline

Mr. Wu (Andy Lau) is kidnapped in Beijing by Zhang Hua (Wang Qianyuan) and three accomplices, all disguised as cops and demanding a ransom of 3 million RMB. In the ensuing 20 hours, the Chinese detectives led by Chief Xing (Liu Ye) quickly form a task force and sweep the city. Time is of the essence as Mr. Wu is ordered to be killed at 9 PM regardless of whether the money is collected or not. The police eventually apprehend Hua alone. As the deadline approaches, the detectives and captors collide.

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Plot Keywords:

police | chinese | businessman | chain | chained | 

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Genres:

Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Official Sites:

Official Facebook Official site China

Country:

China

Language:

Mandarin Chinese

Release Date:

September 2015 (China)

Also Known As:

Saving Mr. Wu

Filming Locations:

Beijing, China

Box Office

Gross USA:

$92,696

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$31,222,161

Company Credits

Production Co:

Beijing Going Zoom Media, Shanghai New Culture Media Group, Beijing Skywheel Entertainment Co.

Technical Specs

Runtime:

105 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby (Dolby 5.1)

Color:

Color Color (original version)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The guy wearing headphone during the raid on massage parlor was the director himself, Shen Ding.

User Reviews

A rare and more serious movie from China

In recent years, the movies produced from China have become more and more ridiculous and shallow, the screenplays were either ridiculous or stupid, the acting of all the characters were more pretentious and exaggerated. Lot of profiting Chinese on-line media companies also jumped on the money train to produce more and more superfluous and hollow films targeting the teenagers or low level TV viewers. Strong influence from Korea also polluted the self-respect and self-dignified of the younger generations in China, more young men looked more feminine and more look-alike the Korean young men, with forehead fully covered; young female actors(if we could tolerate their poor acting talent)look more and more like women in escort business. Pointless wedding scenes became the main course, love scenes, lovers' quarrels or misunderstanding scenes became the main scenarios and the plots. Shooting locations must be either Italy or France with lot of unrealistic story lines portrayed Chinese young men, especially young women living abroad. More and more scenes of passenger airplanes taking off or landing, so the airport terminal departure and arrival scenes also became part of these movies. Then night time party scenes also a must have, scenes of the Chinese young and old characters, male or female binged imported Italian or French wines also became must-have scene. Every female characters, heroines or supporting all looked like models, wearing expensive clothes, driving expensive imported foreign cars.....on and on, endless repeated again and again formulaic scenes, plots and scenarios, same crap, different titles. Then another genre mainly targeting the shallow Chinese viewers I.Q. and logic also polluted the Chinese copycatting movie industries: 99.999% pure ridiculous, clueless, pointless, stupid farce-like movies started to pest the Chinese screens. They completely misunderstood the definitions of "Comedy", they thought by throwing in all the ridiculous scenarios and plots, by allowing the actors doing the stupid exaggerated acting were the indispensable and must-have in their so-called "Comedy". And these above-mentioned stuff have become the total ingredients of the Chinese movie and TV industries.

Another part of the Chinese media industries also become the mouthpiece of the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party. They rewrote the historical record and document, invented so many unorthodox and untrue incidents to praise and kiss the Party, changed the Chinese history to brain wash their younger generations, injected falsified and blind patriotism, national hatred to the Japanese and dislike of the totaled Nationalist Party.

While these are the factual outcome of 95% of the Chinese movie and TV productions. There almost nothing worth watching enough, the tiny 5% portion of them are trying their best to do the good and doing their might to maintain the sanity of the Chinese. And "Saving Mr. Wu" is rightly among the small 5% rare species.

This movie at large is good and serious, but the randomly edited and patched time sequence of the story line, scenarios and the plots suffered huge set back. The formulaic but randomly linked and arranged time frames were like a drunken frog jumping around with no logical sequence.

The leader of the kidnappers also fell into the formulaic type of a farce-like comedian character. By acted and performed like that kind of criminal attitude, there was no way that he could become an Alpha dog but more like a typical American stand-up comedian with gifted and crafty wisecracking dialog. A criminal imprisoned for 10 years with teeth so clinically white was a terrible overlook by the actor and the production part.

Luckily, Andy Lau and those guys who played the police force have not been ruined by the partly unconvincing formula, they were serious, and Andy Lau was more serious in his sincere and complete believable performance as the victim of the kidnap case.

But the self-thought-to-be-correct and self-righteous directing and the editing had jeopardized this film to reach being a premium drama. The poorly assembled time sequence, the hourly patched scenes, the dragging stupid last rescue plan and the unbelievably ridiculous last seconds rescue were simply naively stupid and shallow.

Those overly dramatized scenes, the randomly poor patched jump-around hour this hour that sequences, and the unconvincingly exaggerated comedian-like acting and the overdone smart dialog of the criminal leader inevitably downgraded this film to a just OK thriller. And the curly hairdo of the criminal leader, then suddenly became regular straight prison shortcut hairstyle was another careless poof of this at least still quite watchable 90% serious Chinese film.