The still of THE DEAD END.
By DEREK
Three men involved in a horrific rape-murder case find their time running out as they continue to lie low in THE DEAD END, a psychologically claustrophobic crime drama by Cao Baoping that\'s held together throughout its twists and turns by strong performances from its male cast. Cao Baoping, a Shanxi-born writer-director in his late 40s who started in TV but has since made a mark with three offbeat features - black rural comedy TROUBLE MAKERS (2006), road comedy THE EQUATION OF LOVE AND DEATH (2008) and coming-of-age movie EINSTEIN AND EINSTEIN (2013) - this time brings his customary realist approach to a tough urban crime drama set in Fujian province, but with little of his usual caustic wit or social observation. Despite that, and a twisty plot that takes its time wending across 137 minutes, the script by Mia Jiao (from a novel by Xu Yigua, pen name of former Fujian reporter Xu Ping) is a tough, radical departure from her previous one for family drama EINSTEIN AND EINSTEIN and has resulted in Cao\'s most commercially accessible feature to date.
Following a B&W flashback to the shocking crime that left a family of five dead, the film switches to colour and seven years later as the participants have "shed their skins" and found different lives in the southern province\'s capital, Xiamen. One, Xin Xiaofeng, has joined the police force as an auxiliary detective, and another, Yang Zidao, works as a taxi driver. Both are secretly raising a young girl, nicknamed Weiba ("Tail"), who was orphaned by the crime, but when Xiaofeng gets a sharp-eyed new boss, Yi Guchun, who comes from the town in which the crime was committed, he suspects that his and Zidao\'s days may be numbered.
The film builds some feeling for the two criminals as they discover that their self-styled act of repentance in raising Weiba is in fact useless in the longer term. As Guchun\'s hunch grows that Xiaofeng may have been involved in the unsolved crime, the movie develops into an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse at the same time as Guchun gains respect for Xiaofeng\'s bravery on the job. Things are also complicated by Guchun\'s younger sister, Guxia, falling for Zidao.
Though the pinuppy, 36-year-old Deng Chao (AMERICAN DREAMS IN CHINA, THE BREAKUP GURU) is top-billed as Xiaofeng, and carries the bulk of the action in a sympathetic way, it\'s the older Duan Yihong (WIND BLAST, I DO), playing the watchful, grizzled Captain Yi, who powers the drama - which climaxes in a giddy, vertiginous nailbiter on the edge of a skyscraper. In a straight role for a change, comedian Guo Tao is solid as Xiaofeng\'s partner-in-crime but is overshadowed by the central relationship between the two cops. A longish coda, which includes an explanation of much of the plot, is structurally clumsy; but in general the movie grips the attention both on an acting and directing level, with handheld camerawork by d.p. Luo Pan (OLD FISH, EINSTEIN) intensifying the personal drama.