Sweet Alibis 甜蜜杀机

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Screenplay: 5.0

Acting: 8.0

Visual side: 8.0

Music: 7.0

Overall rating: 5.0

At his precinct, police detective Chi-Yi (Alec Su) falls into the loser category, and he is perfectly happy with that – more than anything in the world, he wants to be left alone. But he is the one who gets stuck with a new partner, Yi-Ping (Ariel Lin) – the police chief's daughter, burning with the desire to crack some case, and to do it with bullets whistling around. Chi-Yi, for his part, tries to steer her toward the safe matter of a poisoned lapdog, not knowing that this poisoning – is only the beginning of a chain that will lead to some very serious people.

Taiwan has never been famous for mainstream entertainment—unless you count teen melodramas, of course. Nevertheless, the success of Black & White Episode 1: The Dawn of Assault seems to have made local filmmakers look at the action-comedy genre from a slightly different angle. The result was Sweet Alibis—an uneven, but for that very reason memorable, hybrid of 1980s–90s Hollywood buddy actioners and the eccentric "auteur" comedies that are typical of Taiwan.

From the former comes the plot, which borrows from its Western counterparts an unnecessary complexity combined with astonishing superficiality. Who, for instance, can now recall offhand what the villainous scheme in Dog Day Afternoon actually was? What were the bad guys in The Last Boy Scout trying to achieve? What machinations were the scoundrels of Lethal Weapon hatching? Here it's a similar story, only in an even more advanced stage—the filmmakers seem genuinely convinced that someone will be interested in this investigation, so they've piled twists and turns on top of it. But they lead to the exact opposite result—it's easy to get lost in the intricacies of the plot and lose all interest in it altogether.

As a comedy, Sweet Alibis works better, but here you have to understand that this is purely Taiwanese cinema, meaning we'll be entertained by not entirely familiar methods. For example, one of the characters is impaled on an iron rod while urinating in an alley, and he fights for his life without stopping the stream (while the killer tries to avoid it). And in another scene, when one of the characters dies, a music-video-style montage begins, seemingly ordinary for such episodes, but with one difference—the woman holding the dying man in her arms starts singing to an off-screen melody, and he joins her in a heartfelt duet.

In fact, this is only the tip of the iceberg—Sweet Alibis is full of unconventional "gimmicks." On the one hand, they add variety to the film; on the other, they undermine an already convoluted storyline—in a world where the dying burst into song, it's very hard to take any villainous scheming seriously. Which doesn't mean the filmmakers see it that way—despite the giggles and the overall unserious, comic-book tone, people here are killed for real. Because of this, it's very hard to deliver any definitive verdict on Sweet Alibis—a vivid film, but hardly one to recommend to those who like "off-format" entertainment.