Watch Shanghai For Free

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

.....and excellent performances, stunning sets, top notch direction. Couldn't have been much better. No spoilers here, but if you want to watch a WWII saga that probably has at least some relevance along with some strong emotion, this is a good one. Cusack, as usual, puts in a very solid performance. That guy never gets the props he deserves, imho. David Morse, Yun-Fat Chow, Li Gong, Ken Watanabe et al put in excellent work. I had seen it out there for a long time, just watched it, and will watch it again. Highly recommended. Talk about desperate times!

Shanghai takes place just before Japan entered the World War Two. Paul Soames (John Cusack) comes to China to look for his friend who, like him, worked for the American intelligence effort. From that basic setting we end up getting a good mystery thriller, with all the usual good stuff. Glamorous women, elegant locations, the looming threat of war, betrayals, reveals, backstabbing and more.One of the film's strengths are its actors. I haven't seen Cusack in anything for a while, but he's still in great shape and gives a good performance as your typical silent neo-noir investigator hero. Li Gong is also very good as Anna Lan-Ting, the resident femme fatale.Truth be told, I kind of wish the script was a bit better so that these people could have really stretched their wings. As it is, it's not bad, but it's not really all that original either. You can figure out the mystery pretty early if you know anything about history, the biggest twist when it comes to characters also comes near the beginning, none of the romance subplots really surprise and as a whole, while I was entertained, I wasn't really that thrilled.Shanghai is a good film to check out if you're a fan of wartime period pieces and want to see one that, for a change, doesn't take place in Western Europe. It has great actors, a decent script, excellent production values and a tight enough pacing to make up for its unoriginality.

This is a fascinating movie in many ways, not least for its partially successful elucidation of a particularly dark period in Shanghai's colourful history. However, "Shanghai" comes across all too often as a confused mish-mash of other movies - Casablanca and The Third Man both spring rather too readily to mind - while offering little of its own in the way of an original plot or any intriguing character arcs.Solid acting work all 'round. Franka Potente is probably the most watchable of the actors here, despite being less toothsome than Gong Li (who looks every bit her age in this movie but is still ravishingly attractive).There are a few intriguing glimpses of Shanghai as it might have been in the early 40s, including one particularly well-recreated crane shot of the Bund - although I have to say the ships look just a tad too close to the imposing British-built buildings lining that famous boulevard. There's another shot from inside the Cusack character's hotel room showing a few of Shanghai's classic buildings through the window, clearly digitally composited as those particular buildings could never have been viewed that way from the one vantage point. However, it seems (judging from the credits) that the vast majority of this movie was shot in Thailand, and thus most of the street scenes and interiors are fairly generic and not particularly evocative of Shanghai's history. For a much better rendition of this you need to have a look at Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution" which treads similar territory (Shanghai, spies, Japanese occupation etc) with much more style.Indeed I find myself wondering why this movie was made at all, given that pretty much 100% of its thematic territory had been covered by Lee's movie just a couple of years before, and with considerably more chutzpah.Nevertheless...if you're a fan of any of these actors, it's worth a look.

It isn't difficult to understand why this hackneyed piece of rubbish has gone std. It must contain every cliché ever used by every other film-maker of a ww2 period drama set somewhere 'exotic'. Every whitefella and even some of the unwhites, gets about in a white linen suit and panama. Cigarette holders (ivory & jade carved of course), a casino, unrequited love, spies, bad eggs plus the occasional good egg hiding among the bad 'uns Claude Rains style, every cliché is there and yet as a movie this thing doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy plagiarism. Un-engaging is how I would best describe it. The plot is predictable, the costumes are uninspired and the actors frequently appear to be doing little more than any decent clothes horse would. So much could have been done in this movie. Surely the US is mature enough now for a complete re-examination of what really happened in the years leading up to Pearl Harbour, and take ownership of their role in inciting the Japanese American conflict. You won't find any of that here. The Japanese and Germans are all evil. There is no attempt whatsoever to consider the reasons Japan decided that an attack on Pearl Harbour was its last best option. People are portrayed as worrying about the fate of Jews when contemporary accounts actually reveal that was the last thing on the minds of the soon to be allies before and during WW2. Race was a factor in the war in the Pacific, although not quite the way it was portrayed here. The Japanese were accepted by a big chunk of the middle class indigenous populations of the English and French colonies they invaded, as freeing those societies from white anti-Asian racism. After all the Japanese were Asian as well. It wasn't until after WW2 that persecution of the Jews by the European Nazis was reported as a major issue.None of these distortions are exclusive to this movie, there have been a zillion others just like it. But why bother to spend all this money on yet another ho-hum cliché full of cartoon characters, that doesn't even come close to any sort of historical accuracy? WW2 is sufficiently distant now that objective assessment should be a hallmark of any movie about that period which is aiming for A grade status.