Remember the first decade of the 21st Century?
Gold Rush Gang
Now streaming worldwide on Netflix.
A lifetime ago, Thai filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of a Black Tiger (2000), Citizen Dog (Orig. Mah nakorn) (2004), and Red Eagle (2010) lit up our genre-loving minds with their wild fusion of action, comedy, and melodrama, unlike most anything else we'd seen in North America. (See the coverage linked below to get a sense of how much we anticipated and then thoroughly enjoyed those movies.)
Speaking for myself, however, I lost track of the director's career over the past 15 years, which made his newest film, Gold Rusk Gang, a must-see when it popped up on Netflix yesterday. I was nearly disengaged entirely by the patently obvious digital effects in the opening sequence, which looked like exploding blood squibs had been cut-and-pasted on top of the action.
But I'm happy I held on, because Sasanatieng's impulse for manic, extended action sequences sustained my interest whenever they appeared, and helped make the storylines about yearning lovers and fatal attractions easier to swallow.
His action scenes retain their preposterous lunacy, despite the copious amounts of CGI blood, in the same that way that witty situation-comedies can still make us laugh: we're all in on the same joke, and we appreciate the actors and stunt people who pretend they're getting shot dead and/or wounded.
The same goes for the soapy melodrama, which sometimes made me want to gag, and sometimes made me infuriated, as when a spurned man immediately took his rejection so badly that he turned it into a sexual assault. The woman fought him off and other men quickly came to her defense, though later in the film she unaccountably softens (?!).
The gist of the story is that in the dying days of World War II, a small gang known as the Thai Thieves carry out a series of raids on the Imperial Japanese Army. The gang consists of a kind-hearted leader and four young people -- three men and one woman -- who were all abandoned as children and adopted by the kind-hearted leader.
Now they fight and steal and fall in love with one another and get rejected by one another and banter and joke and fly through the air and foil all the plans of the evil Japanese Army, who are caricatured at cartoon levels. In between that, they yearn and think back fondly on their younger days. The comedy is slapstick, for the most part, but it's so disjointed that it often made me laugh.
The romantic interplay feels like a distraction to pad the running time, until they are not. Without giving anything away, I had to stand up and applaud (at home) the concluding sequences, which build upon everything that goes before and leads to a magnificent confrontation in a multi-hued forest -- I don't care even if it's all digital effects, the yellows and reds and greens look awesome and make for an amazing backdrop -- and an armed exchange that rivals even the pinnacle of all things, John Woo's original The Killer (1989), for its outlandishness, if not the sheer quality and devastating impact.
To summarize: your mileage may vary. But see this movie.
Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.