Missing

In Hong Kong, Dr. Gao Jing (Lee Sinje) is introduced to the brother of her best girlfriend Chen Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong), the photographer and diver Dave Chen Guo Dong (Guo Xiao Dong). They fall in love for each other and Guo Dong invites Gao Jing to travel to Taiwan to visit an ancient submarine city, where he intends to propose her. During the dive, Guo Dong vanishes and his headless body is found later while Gao Jing cannot recall what happened underwater. She decides to investigate and a bleak mystery is disclosed.

"Sam Hoi Tsam Yan" is a messy, boring and melodramatic never-ending ghost story. The screenplay is awful, with many ridiculous twists where nothing is what seems to be. This movie is so terrible that gives the sensation that will never end. The only good point is the wonderful cinematography. The absurd plot in IMDb is totally wrong. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Mergulho Fatal" ("Fatal Dive")

Diving deep into the emotional longevity of what grief can inflict on an individual, Missing does not feel like a Tsui Hark film, as it's so far removed from his style. Mixing traditional supernatural beliefs with a psychological character study, Hark spins a tangled, often confusing web that while laudable doesn't quite sustain his ambitions. It instead offers a hodge-podge of genres ranging from psychological ghostly horrors to melodramatic romance, the very idea of the film is exciting but it has too many ingredients that ultimately leave it as a very messy piece of work, often looking hurriedly shot and put together almost as if it was made in a mad rush of a creative spark. It drags its feet to a rather unsatisfactory conclusion of multiple endings, feeling way longer than its advertised 2-hour runtime. Thankfully in the years, Hark's direction has remained steadfast and enjoyable, backed up by a passable score by Ricky Ho, Missing ultimately just misses the mark for me in its attempt to try so much, though the effort involved is commendable, the results are not.

Angelica Lee and Isabella Leong investigate the enigmatic death of a loved one at sea in this film by Tsui Hark. The visuals and camera-work are excellent, with some cool sequences filmed underwater. (Seriously, the cinematography is exceptional.) The ghouls are very unusual and are "touched up" with some CGI. The storyline is very engaging, with multiple elements introduced to keep the viewer off balance. Some have criticized the film for being schizophrenic, but this method of storytelling is actually effective, interesting, and adds some unpredictability. The romantic elements are on the cheesy side, but this film simply does not deserve the abuse it has taken from online reviewers. It maintains interest from start to finish; and sometimes that's good enough.

I normally wouldn't bother writing a review for a film I rate a 6/10, but the sheer level of abuse this film has received from IMDb reviewers is surprising. "Missing" is so unpretentious and harmless that I question how someone in their right mind could hate the film to the degree of giving it a 1/10 rating. Then again, these are the same people who gave Jet Li's pretentious, over-dramatic fluff piece "The Warlords" (2007) a 10/10 (as well as Woo's pathetic "Red Cliff") – so maybe I'm expecting a little too much individuality when dealing with the bandwagon jumpers that infest IMDb. In all honesty, I find that the average ratings on this website have become almost completely useless.

After calling "Missing" a complete mess, one reviewer claimed that only those who liked "Diary" (2006) could buy into this movie. This was an obvious attempt to indirectly trash both films by drawing a parallel between two "convoluted" story lines with "copout" endings. One can only assume that this guy has no idea what he's talking about. "Diary" is a masterpiece of horror cinema that is on a level far higher than that of "Missing." The twists and turns in "Diary" are well-executed with little in terms of ambiguity; almost every single event is adequately explained. "Missing", on the other hand, includes a twist that tosses a good portion of the film into subjective interpretation. I say this in defense of "Diary" so that readers understand that the comparison is completely unwarranted and misguided.

I do find it ironic that overpraised directors like David Lynch can operate within a universe where virtually everything is tossed up to subjective interpretation, yet receive heaping amounts of praise for being original and innovative. How is this any different from what Tsui Hark does in "Missing"? Sure, the big twist that's revealed during the latter third of the film basically forces the viewer to interpret the preceding events in a symbolic light, but some of it does have very specific psychological meaning. That still leaves the final third of the film to operate within objective reality, which is far more than what Lynch provided in the abhorrent "Eraserhead." So what's the problem? "Missing" is not nearly as weird as "Eraserhead", but it sure makes a LOT more sense, yet it somehow is excluded from receiving credit for using ambiguity to provoke thought and introduce originality. I'm not understanding this double standard.

Now, I'm not saying that "Missing" is a great film. It's got some healthy doses of cheesiness and some of the events that take place during the opening hour may not hold up well after a second viewing, but there is a constant aura of interest that is maintained from start to finish – which is more than one can say for the seemingly endless barrage of carbon-copy Chinese historical epics like "The Warlords" and "Three Kingdoms" that quite frankly have NO originality, NO enjoyability, NO artistic integrity, and NO purpose for existing other than to ape Hollywood with soulless garbage masked behind a veil of massive budgets.

I'll take a film like "Missing" over those pathetic projects any day of the week. I may not recommend a blind buy, but a rental with reasonable expectations is not something to run away from.

I hate to make such a statement, but until I see something better from him, I think Tsui Hark has lost his Midas Touch. He had given us wonderful movies, some of which are my personal favourites like the Once Upon A TIme in China series starring Jet Li, and the Blade, but in his attempt to register a more prolific comeback after his less than stellar stab at Hollywood, his recent filmography had blown hot and cold, with more misses save for his collaboration in Triangle. Missing unfortunately falls into the Stinker category.

No doubt there's a ton of potential as to how the story could develop, given the teases in the trailer, but what was delivered happened to be a convoluted plot which made very little sense and became extremely indecisive, like an octopus putting its tentacles into every conceivable nook and cranny genre ranging from supernatural romance to psychological thriller, that if it had stuck to one primary idea, it might have been fairly enjoyable.

Unfortunately, it seemed like Hark wanted to ape after the contemporary Asian horror masters in the Pang Brothers from technique in storytelling, right down to casting one of their regular lead actress Angelica Lee as the role of Dr Gao Jin, a psychologist who hits it off with underwater photographer Dave Chen (Guo Xiao Dong), the brother of her patient Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong). A whirlwind romance ensues and in Dave's bid to propose to his beau underwater near the ruins off Japan's Yonaguni Island (which you don't get to see at all), tragedy strikes, but we don't get to see what actually happened, providing the avenue for mysterious flashbacks and investigations into what was.

But there's when most of the 2 hour runtime seem to find itself stuck in, coming up with so many subplots they get dumped unceremoniously when they no longer fit the whim of the moment. You get some outright statements on ecology and the saving of our oceans, then you get some spooky scenes with mysterious figures and spirits trying to garner some cheap scares. Granted these are the moments which were suspense filled and the audience let on to expect further exploration at a later time, only to be disappointed by its lack of focus no thanks to wanting to experiment with some fiery special effects. Just when you think you got the hang of things, Missing throws you totally off tangent with yet another major revelation almost two-thirds of the way, in what I would deem as a cheap cop-out, where further explanation would spoil it for you.

Suffice to say that if you like the Pang Brothers' Diary, then you might buy into Missing. Otherwise, you'll begin to roll your eyes and clock watch, as the story begins to suffer from its now unbelievable and much scattered design, and relied too much on coincidence to move everything forward toward a finale that just seem to not know when to end. And that was its ultimate flaw. It had plenty of moments when to pull the plug to mitigate the suffering of an audience, but no, it dragged on, and on, with each moment building on the ridiculousness of the previous minutes.

In all honesty, I understood Tsui Hark's intentions in attempting to bring out a more emotional film about love and lost, especially toward the end when it realized it had burnt the bridges to salvage something horrific. In its lazy presentation in not knowing what to edit and leave out of the story, Missing felt just like one of the props in the movie, a headless body without any clear direction where to go towards. I thought it had hit the nail on the head during one of the many endings, but realized this last ditch attempt was wasted when it still refused to roll the end credits.

And no matter how much pedigree Angelica Lee has brought from her reigning Scream- Queen experience, somehow it was just that which turns out to be the albatross around her neck, as she offers nothing new from her range of expressions in movies like The Eye, and Re-cycle, other than look visibly aged. Isabella Leong doesn't fare any better too with her character as she turns vampish in her role when she returns to the incident site to seek out her brother, and Tony Leung Kar Fai and Chang Chen had only supporting roles to bookend the movie. The latter's role was surprisingly the better one as a soft-spoken man with a penchant for predicting the supernatural, but alas is one character that is forgotten soon enough.

Final verdict? Watch Missing at your own peril. It does boast some very few moments of genuine horror, and nicely done special effects, before surrendering everything to slip- shoddy storytelling. The more subplots it dwelled upon, the more loopholes managed to creep into it, making the title a premonition of what the movie is actually all about - missing everything needed to make this a decent movie.