Teddy Chan’s career as a filmmaker has been a series of what he has been able to package into something marketable. All one has to do is look at the cast for “Bodyguards and Assassins” to know what I mean, or all those Jordan Chan films he made in the 90s because that was back when people gave a shit about him.
The angle for this latest film, “Double World”? It’s based on a Chinese video game. That was enough to make me incredibly skeptical, and indeed upon watching it, it is filled with the kind of trite sentimentality that is typically the norm in Chinese internet novels and Chinese internet culture in general.
However, unlike other internet novel adaptations, “Double World” is saved by Teddy Chan’s shameless penchant for nasty violence, with some of the set pieces such as the preposterous coliseum sequence looking like something Jimmy Wang Yu would have done back then if he had money and CGI. This movie would have sucked, but Chan doesn’t let the dubious source material prevent him from delivering the goods on a basic level.
Teddy Chan’s career as a filmmaker has been a series of what he has been able to package into something marketable. All one has to do is look at the cast for “Bodyguards and Assassins” to know what I mean, or all those Jordan Chan films he made in the 90s because that was back when people gave a shit about him.
The angle for this latest film, “Double World”? It’s based on a Chinese video game. That was enough to make me incredibly skeptical, and indeed upon watching it, it is filled with the kind of trite sentimentality that is typically the norm in Chinese internet novels and Chinese internet culture in general.
However, unlike other internet novel adaptations, “Double World” is saved by Teddy Chan’s shameless penchant for nasty violence, with some of the set pieces such as the preposterous coliseum sequence looking like something Jimmy Wang Yu would have done back then if he had money and CGI. This movie would have sucked, but Chan doesn’t let the dubious source material prevent him from delivering the goods on a basic level.
