“There’s no post-credits scene,” grumbled the elderly theater employee sweeping up around patrons lingering after a screening of Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back on Friday. “This isn’t a blockbuster. Only blockbusters have post-credits scenes.”
That the confrontation actually took place in the post-credits scene of The Demons Strike Back—and that the movie, which has taken in over half a billion dollars worldwide since its January 28 opening, decidedly is a blockbuster—is all part of its ramshackle charm. A sequel to 2013’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, whose $215 million earnings made it then the most successful Chinese film of all time, the new movie is hardly a low-profile production. Original director Stephen Chow, who holds the current record for highest-grossing Chinese film with last year’s The Mermaid, returned as co-writer and producer. The revered wuxia master Tsui Hark took over the director’s chair. (It’s actually Chow and Tsui playing the main roles in that self-deprecating credits tag.) And the cast was revamped to swap out older comedy veterans for young pop stars and a former NBA player. But you’d never know it from the movie’s virtually unpublicized U.S. release, which began on Febuary 3 in a mere 67 theaters. (Opening weekend gross: $467,000.)
Even in the U.S., there’s a small but dedicated audience for these movies: My screening, at Manhattan’s AMC Empire 25, was largely full despite the $20 price of an IMAX 3-D ticket, Sony Pictures, who released The Demons Strike Back, was compelled to expand The Mermaid’s release last year after larger-than-expected turnout. (It still fell short of $1 million in the U.S., but Sony more than tripled its initial 35-screen release.) It’s long been the case that while the U.S.’ biggest movies are also its biggest exports, foreign smash hits rarely make a dent at the U.S. box office. But if The Demons Strike Back doesn’t have the obvious makings of a U.S. blockbuster, there’s a lot in it that Hollywood could learn from.
Taking its cues from the mo lei tau (nonsense) comedies that made Chow famous as an actor, The Demons Strike Back is aggressively loopy from its opening frames, in which the demon-hunting Buddhist monk Tang (K-pop star Kris Wu) finds himself swarmed, Gulliver-style, by hundreds of tiny people. The sequence turns out to be a dream, but the movie that follows is only slightly more constrained by the rules of logic. As in the previous film, and in the 16th-century novel on which the movies are (very) loosely based, Tang is joined by the hot-tempered Monkey King, a vain shapeshifter called Pigsy, and an aquatic demon named Sandy who spends a good chunk of the movie in the form of an enormous, perpetually sneezing fish. There is little plot to speak of. Tang and his crew encounter demons, usually in disguise, and defeat them; when they’re not fighting demons, they fight with each other. Tsui and Chow make a vague attempt to continue Conquering the Demons’ storyline, but those scenes feel tossed-off and convictionless, as if they’re just there to give people a chance to grab a soda or check their texts between fight scenes.
Those fight scenes, though: Hoo boy. Imagine a world-upending battle as wacked-out as X-Men Apocalypse where you can actually tell what’s going on, or a version of Doctor Strange’s cosmos-rending conflict without the fun-killing Sturm und Drang (or, for that matter, the whitewashing). At only $60 million, The Demons Strike Back’s budget doesn’t come close to that of a major Hollywood action movie. But what its computer-generated spectacles lack in verisimilitude they more than make up for in clarity and inventiveness. During one battle, Tang and his crew discover that the house full of seductive women they’ve been lured into is actually populated by disguised spider-demons (or, as the subtitles call them, “hairy crabs”). In the ensuing melee, several of the spiders, whose human torsos still hang from beneath their abdomens, are grabbed by their jets of sticky silk, smashed upwards through the house’s roof many stories above, and then down through the floor, revealing a vast infernal hive beneath it. They explode into pieces that turn out to be much smaller spiders, and then recombine to form one big spidery beast with a constantly roiling surface and dozens of glowing red eyes. Meanwhile our heroes are constantly scampering about, and, in the cases of the non-human ones, transforming, somehow prevailing despite constantly nearly getting their heads handed to them.
It’s insanity, but it’s carefully orchestrated insanity. Tsui stages the action cleanly, and he doesn’t clutter up his shots with digital debris. If the action were set in the real world, the lack of surrounding detail might be a distraction, but by the time characters are throwing mountains at each other, you’re long past caring whether there are enough clouds in the sky. China remains a major market for 3-D, and Tsui uses the format far more aggressively than Hollywood filmmakers; two characters are given infinitely extensible limbs just so they can shoot out of the screen and threaten to poke you in the eye. It’s all terribly silly, the polar opposite of Hollywood comic-book movies and their perennial apocalypses, but it turns out the movie-industry wisdom about “stakes” doesn’t really hold true. If the action is engaging enough, the fate of the world doesn’t have to hang in the balance to justify the spectacle.
Conquering the Demons’ mixture of frenetic slapstick and iconic imagery takes a while to get the hang of. At times, it feels like a Sergio Leone western that’s been recast with the Three Stooges. And despite its feints at a romantic subplot, the movie seems helpless to figure out what to do with female characters when they’re not luring our heroes into danger. (Although Shu Qi’s character died at the end of the previous film, she shows up in this one a few times anyway, and gives it a jolt of energy and a maturity of performance it’s otherwise desperately lacking.) But the likes of Michael Bay and Zack Snyder would do well to study it all the same. The market for Chinese movies is growing at a fast clip—the top 12 grossing Chinese movies of all time were all released in the last 12 years—and stopgap measures hiring Zhang Yimou to direct an action movie about the Great Wall and then casting Matt Damon in the lead seem destined to end up pleasing no one. Blockbuster directors are increasingly making movies for Chinese audiences; they could stand to pay closer attention to the movies those audiences already love as well.
