Plot
An American man (John Cusack) returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love with a Chinese woman (Gong Li) and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.
Editor's Review
Some things to note about Shanghai, a new murder-mystery/romantic thriller set in the titular city in the weeks before Pearl Harbor.
First, with Watchmen and now this, Jeffrey Dean Morgan seems to be making a career out of having his character murdered in the first 10 minutes of a movie and showing up in flashback for the rest of it.
Second, it's nice to see Chow Yun-Fat back in some frenzied gunplay, even if it's just for a couple of scenes.
Third, the filmmakers managed to make London and Thailand pass off convincingly enough as Shanghai after Chinese authorities denied them permission to shoot on location.
At least, it's "convincing" in the sense that - since most of us have never seen 1941 Shanghai - this viewer wasn't made to feel too frequently that this was some recreated set somewhere.
A large part of the credit for helping to pull off this illusion should go to the filmmakers and cast, for concocting an absorbing murder-mystery and tossing in some forbidden romance, all against a tense backdrop where you know war is going to break out at almost any minute.
Life in the seething city is seen through the eyes of John Cusack's character Paul Soames, a Naval Intelligence officer - okay, "spy" - as he investigates the murder of his buddy (Morgan).
The trail leads him to folks like triad boss Anthony Lan-Ting (Chow), his wife Anna (Gong Li) who leads a double life, and Japanese intelligence officer Tanaka (Watanabe).
It's a tad more complicated than it sounds, but watching as the characters' destinies become more intertwined is part of the movie's charm, so I won't let on any more here.
The main strengths of Shanghai lie in the interaction of its characters (in particular, Watanabe's scenes with Cusack, not quite cat-and-mouse but where every syllable uttered by Tanaka seems to be bait in a trap to draw out the American spy), the uniformly fine performances by its cast, and its evocation of the tension-filled times where death literally lurked around every corner.
It's never dull, with Cusack and Gong Li pretty much setting the screen smoldering with their longing glances (yeah, there's some forbidden love in the story too) when there isn't a gunfight or assassination attempt or street execution taking place.
Shanghai, however, stumbles in its denouement, where events and motivations turn out to be less grand and more mundane than we were led to believe.
Well then, just regard the journey as the reward and the destination as, um, just the end of the movie.
Source :The Star: