Cliff Walkers (2021, Zhang Yimou) (Patreon)

66/100

Plays like the movie you might get if you asked a gaggle of capable screenwriters to concoct one espionage setpiece each, then assembled their efforts into a single narrative. That's by no means a bad thing, and Cliff Walkers chugs expertly from Go-Pro-facilitated parachute jumps to cat-and-mouse dead-drop shenanigans to guns-blazing car chases, with regular local stops for "Who's the mole?" (featuring a terrifically soulful performance from Yu Hewei as he who burrows). Zhang takes full advantage of snow's visual majesty—the whole movie looks hushed—and nimbly executes both the kinetic spectacle and the convoluted gamesmanship; the film's comparatively staid quality feels a little disappointing as a followup to Shadow's gonzo expressionism (though in fact One Second, which is only now arriving on the fest circuit as I write this, was made between the two), but is ideally suited to the genre. What doesn't work especially well are efforts to lend this series of discrete spy-vs.-spy units a human dimension, predicated on (a) the improbable composition of an elite, Russian-trained unit that consists of two romantic couples (that then split apart for the whole movie so they can fret about each other) and (b) maudlin backstory—bleeding into present-tense melodrama—involving one of the couple's young children. Also the mission itself never made much sense to me, in terms of why these people were needed to achieve this objective, and there are plot elements that I still don't understand even in hindsight, e.g. how the head collaborationist knows that Jin isn't actually the mole (even as he executes him for being the mole—that part I get). Oh, and lose the harmonica score, which sounds like ersatz Morricone (specifically from The Untouchables). Still, a gripping good time.