6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.2 |
A government department known as the Six Panels appoints their best officer to infiltrate a special force called the Divine Constabulary, to ensure their way in stopping the circulation of counterfeit coin currency in the capital.
Starring: Chao Deng, Ronald Cheng, Collin Chou, Anthony Chau-Sang Wong, Waise LeeForeign | 100% |
Action | 78% |
Martial arts | 58% |
Fantasy | 1% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.20:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Mandarin: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Mandarin: Dolby Digital 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
It’s never a good sign when a film starts out with so much manic energy, quick cutting and unclear plot development that what’s going on isn’t just confusing, it’s a complete mystery. Who are these people? Why are they fighting each other? And who are the good guys and who are the bad? The good news in all of this, at least with regard to The Four, is that things happen so quickly in the opening fifteen or so minutes of the film that there’s little time to actually sit back and ruminate over these queries. Instead one simply needs to surrender to the chaos and hope that things improve. If they do, at least slightly anyway, the film is still hobbled by a really odd lack of clarity in its dramatic through line, even if it’s filled to the brim with lots of interesting (if cliché ridden) characters. Though the source novels that inspired The Four (as well as several television precursors to this feature film adaptation) have been around for decades, there’s little doubt that someone saw some copious handwriting on the wall, namely the insanely huge box office receipts of the X-Men Trilogy and their attendant outings X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: First Class. If there aren’t actual bean counters in the Chinese film industry, there are probably at least abacus bead counters, and with a pre-existing franchise that already had a built in audience base courtesy of probably two to three generations of readers and television viewers, it’s not hard to imagine that The Four seemed like a sure bet. Indeed, the film already has sequels in the works, though if this is to become a truly spectacular franchise, someone needs to go back to Screenwriting 101 and learn the salient lesson that just throwing as much activity on the screen as possible does little to engage an audience.
Not these four, but who's counting?
The Four is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.20:1. This digitally shot feature looks nicely crisp a lot of the time, though I suspect that the co-directors along with Yiu-Fai Lai deliberately chose a somewhat softer looking overall ambience so that they could more artfully blend some of the fantasy laden CGI elements. Therefore, this doesn't have the extreme pop some might expect, and instead offers a somewhat more painterly look a lot of the time. The film has been fairly aggressively color graded, often to the ever popular slate gray-blue side of things, which tends to at least partially rob the image of some fine detail. The more "normal" looking sequences offer abundant fine detail in close-ups, however. Contrast is generally fine, though is a bit anemic in some of the darkest interior sequences.
The Four's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is a fantastically immersive and well designed affair from literally the first moment of the film, when we get a bird's eye view (replete with bird) of the main village with great sweeping wing effects panning through the sound field. That level of nuance continues pretty much unabated for the rest of the film, with lots of discrete channelization for foley effects in the fight sequences as well as some well done separation in crowded dialogue moments. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is extremely wide.
The Four is decent enough mindless entertainment, but this new would be franchise is off to a pretty rocky start. The film will work best for those willing to not think once, let alone twice, about everything that happens in it, since so little of it makes sense. Still, it's a nice looking feature that does have some spectacular fight choreography, so if you like that sort of thing, you may want to check it out.
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