Directed By Tran Anh Hung
Starring Josh Hartnett, Lee Byung-Hun, Takuya Kimura, Shawn Yue and Elias Koteas
It’s too easy to hate a truly terrible movie. Usually, though, the feeling that comes with, say, the latest hate crime from the folks behind Disaster Movie, is one of apathy; nobody with a lick of sense expects those films to be good, and usually forget and ignore them accordingly. Much more worthy of disappointment are those films that have the potential to be truly amazing, but entirely squander it, leaving you with just a taste of the greatness you could’ve seen if not for a writer or director’s baffling narrative decisions. I Come With The Rain is just such a movie – one that flirts with greatness and has all the pieces for a great film, but is all the more frustrating for never connecting them together.
The film follows Kline (Josh Hartnett), a former cop whose obsessive hunt for a twisted serial killer (Elias Koteas) left him psychologically fractured and physically scarred. Now working as a P.I., he’s hired by the reclusive CEO of a major pharmaceutical company to fly to China and track down his missing son Shitao (Takuya Kimura). Kline enlists the help of old friend and Hong Kong cop Meng Zi (Shawn Yue) to find the missing son, but the case quickly leads them into the path of vicious, enterprising gangster Su Dongpo (Lee Byung-Hun), and things only get stranger when Shitao is found living on the streets, using apparently divine powers to heal the sick and injured.
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Part neo-noir detective story, part psychological thriller and part meditative modern religious fable, I Come With The Rain is plenty of parts, but no cohesive whole. Which is especially troublesome since there’s a truly fantastic modern noir movie in there somewhere if the script lent more attention to it. All the elements are there: A stellar cast, a tortured, but obsessively dogged P.I. protagonist, potentially great villains, a dark, exotic urban landscape and gorgeous visuals (some later scenes are reminiscent of Michael Mann’s recent shot-on-HD work). But writer/director Tran Anh Hung is too concerned with the meandering go-nowhere religious subtext that he completely neglects the actual plot, leaving every layer of the narrative feeling malnourished in favour of Christian symbolism that has the subtlety of a megaton bomb and nothing at all to say.
Hartnett’s an actor who I really like, and while he delivers an excellent, nuanced performance here, he’s also short-changed by his character, whose detective work flits between blind luck and sheer stupidity. During his first scene in Hong Kong, the guy he’s searching for is standing a few feet from him in a police station; Kline looks him dead in the face, and even while holding two photos of Shitao for comparison, doesn’t even do a double-take. His next plan of action is to head to Hong Kong’s tallest building with some binoculars and scout the entire city like a giant ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle. Which actually works; Kline is either a clairvoyant superdetective, or more likely, it’s a prime example of the script’s lazy attempts to string together its slapdash story.
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The rest of the cast do great work, too, but similarly suffer from the same clumsy script. Elias Koteas is effectively chilling, Lee Byung-Hun (to whom playing a Korean villain is now second nature) is absolutely effortless and never fails to bring huge amounts of presence to a role, Takuya Kimura is impressively expressive in what’s mostly a silent role, while Shawn Yue is solid as the fiery, cocksure cop, but struggles the most with delivering phonetic English dialogue. Sadly the wonderful ensemble feels mostly wasted as every sub-plot feels undercooked and clumsily pasted together amidst meandering, not-as-profound-as-it-thinks religious overtones and (admittedly beautiful) visual montages.
Tran’s attempts at creating something ambitious and unconventional are certainly commendable, but it’s impossible not to feel like I Come With The Rain would be an infinitely more satisfying movie if he’d jettisoned the dead-end religious sub-plot and symbolism and focused instead on delivering a tightly-plotted detective story. The glimpses we do get of that film only prove that the excellent cast and gorgeous visual filmmaking would’ve made it something special, but the modern Christ fable that takes precedence is sadly as subtle and insightful as a 12-year-old’s R.E. essay. I Come With The Rain is an often fascinating film, but though its unconventional story and often bizarrely violent imagery certainly demands attention, you’ll only be rewarded with frustrating glimpses at what could’ve been a much greater film.
The Film:
The disc that Trinity Home Entertainment kindly sent along for review was a promotional screener without extras, so I can’t properly assess the special features and video/audio quality of the final release.
The screener wasn’t cropped like the Japanese DVD/Blu-ray, so presumably the UK home video release preserves the film’s original 2:35.1 aspect ratio, but I can’t say for certain.
The DVD and Blu-ray include a Making Of feature and the film’s trailer.
I Come With The Rain is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK now.
Click here to order the DVD from Amazon.co.uk.