Lost City: The Deadly Affair 迷城之正义对决

All posters ¹

Screenplay: 5.0

Acting: 5.0

Visual side: 5.0

Music: 5.0

Overall rating: 3.0

Police inspector Chen Qiang launches his own investigation into the seemingly accidental death of a traffic patrol officer who was electrocuted during a routine search inside a truck. Everything points to an accident, but Chen Qiang senses there is more to the case. He first tracks down the truck driver, Zhang Kai, and through him reaches the owners of his transport company, who are clearly involved in illegal business. To prove that the wiring was deliberately tampered with, Chen Qiang turns for help to an experienced car tuner, Liu Qiang.

When you understand the path Chinese internet cinema has taken over the past five years, the very fact that films like Lost City appear on streaming platforms hits close to home, almost like a personal insult – someone out there is trying, coming up with ideas, shooting, editing, spending money on good actors and computer graphics, while someone else slaps together frankly amateurish nonsense on their knee, without even bothering to create a remotely eye-catching poster, and gets exactly the same spot on the streaming shelf as the best examples of internet cinema. All efforts should be thrown into restoring that kind of justice, not into the nonsense the characters of Lost City get up to.

What the filmmakers were trying to achieve seems clear enough – they were making a detective story with notes of a crime drama, but the way the film is written, directed and, most importantly, put together as a whole, вызывает sincere bewilderment. The script is overflowing with coincidences – suffice it to say that Chen Qiang knows Zhang Kai, and Liu Qian, on the one hand, crossed paths with Zhang Kai on the road a minute before the accident, and on the other, has his own scores to settle with the owners of the shadow business that Chen Qiang is digging into. The world is small, of course, but not that small!

The direction by Shen Hong-Xiang is banal, dull and straightforward, and perhaps hoping to somehow fix this, the producers tried to improve things with editing. It turned out even worse – the action doesn't just jump – it lurches from one thing to another. A smooth, coherent, unified story stubbornly refuses to come together, the plot develops like an old worn record, either getting stuck in one place or suddenly skipping ahead. The only action scene is placed at the finale and – what a surprise! – looks utterly impoverished.

Special mention must be made of the work of everyone responsible for music and sound, because such unprofessionalism in internet cinema hasn't been encountered not just in a long time – never, even in its earliest years. The soundtrack is an absolutely chaotic collection of melodies that rarely fit what's happening on screen, individual sound effects are unnatural, as if they were taken from audio libraries for eight-bit games, and it's all mixed so horribly that the music is almost always pushed to the forefront, drowning out the other sounds. How something like this can be released is, of course, an interesting question, but a rhetorical one. Far more interesting is how something like this can be accepted and bought, because streaming platforms must have editors responsible for content, right? Films like this won't just fail to bring in new subscribers – they'll scare off the old ones.