Ultra Slick Trailer For Chinese Crime Film LETHAL HOSTAGE Impresses

Common wisdom says that mainland China cannot produce good crime films. Strict censorship laws regarding portrayal of police and criminal activity have made it next to impossible for mainland filmmakers to make satisfying crime pictures, leaving that particular oeuvre to Hong Kong instead.

But if Cheng Er's Lethal Hostage manages to live up to its stellar trailer - or even come close - it will prove that bit of common knowledge wrong.

Produced by Crazy Racer director Ning Hao, Lethal Hostage revolves around a drug dealer who falls in love with his hostage and decides to quit the business following one final deal.

We all know that there's no such thing as "one final" anything in film and things certainly seem to go very bad very fast from there. Frankly I'm baffled as to how this trailer managed to pass censorship - never mind the full feature - but it's not so much the content that impresses as the style. There's an icy classiness to Cheng's work that is rarely seen in these sorts of films, in fact the last time I recall something comparable out of the Chinese speaking world was when the first trailers for Andrew Lau's Infernal Affairs arrived online. Check the trailer below.