RE-CYCLE

Director: Pang Brothers

Stars: Lee Sinje, Yaqi Zeng, Lawrence Chou, Ekin Cheng, Siu-Ming Lau

Year: 2006

Rating: R

(in Cantonese w/English subtitles)

Boy, was I looking forward to this film. The Pang Brothers are the brilliant filmmakers responsible for (among others) one of my favorite horror/suspense flicks ever, The Eye - and this film of theirs, Re-Cycle, even stars two of the main actors from that previous film, Angelica Lee (here, again, billed as Lee Sinje), and Lawrence Chou. So when discovering the film on Netflix, it was a no-brainer to order it in.

Unfortunately, like a caffeine crash about three in the afternoon when you still have two hours to go at work, Re-Cycle was a real letdown. A truly stunning film visually, with lots of green screen and CGI that looks as real as anything you're likely to see in film today - but nevertheless, the characters and story just don't live up to the visuals.

Angelica Lee stars as Tsui Ting-Yin, a famous novelist known for her bestselling romance trilogy - the first of which has just been made into a film. She's been promoting her new romance while at the same time trying to being work on her new novel, this time going far out of her genre (and safety zone) by trying to write a horror novel. She's struggling pretty hard with both protagonist and story, is constantly revising and crumbling up pages of writing to feed to the trash can ... but when odd things start to happen around her house - visions of a tall shape with long hair out the corner of her eye, paper moving by itself on her desk and in the wastebasket, ghostly shapes darting about just outside her peripheral vision - it doesn't take long for Ting-Yin to be pulled into an alternate dimension. A place for all the forgotten things of the world - people, toys, ideas, characters. A place where the forgotten things also seem to be pretty hocked off at being forgotten. There, she eventually meets a little girl with no name who takes Ting-Yin on a quest to find the Transit - the only way that Ting-Yin can take to get back to her own world.

The first problem with this film is that it's billed as a horror movie, and it's not. The first fifteen minutes or so live up to that moniker beautifully - but after that, the story turns more into a fantasy/science fiction tale set in a world that sometimes resembles a videogame. Angelica Lee is very good in the part of Ting-Yin - all the actors are pretty good - but somehow you never wholeheartedly buy into the characters; maybe because you never really get to know them. About 90% of the film is spent only with Ting-Yin, the nameless little girl, and a kindly older gentleman (Siu-Ming Lau) who shows them, via a map, the way to the Transit. The other actors - Chou, Ekin Cheng, etc. - are barely in the film for the first fifteen minutes or so, before Ting-Yin embarks on her journey into the other realm, and that's a bit of a disappointment. Some of the scenes in the film also run on too long, as if the Pangs really want to show you this amazing, visually spectacular world they've created ... when, after awhile, you may well be sitting there thinking, "Okay, I get it - let's move on!"

The ultimate "message" of the film has a lot to do with not forgetting our past - particularly the people we haven't seen or spoken too in a long time, even as we still want them in our lives. It's a great message, and this is a beautiful film - again, truly stunning - but somehow lacking in the very substance the filmmakers intended. ** - Reel Mediocre