
An amusing stoush in a kitchen with inventive and imaginative fight choreography employing pots, pans, food, flame, knives, graters – everything including the kitchen sink- kick starts WEEKEND IN TAIPEI, an East West crime story.
Following up, there’s an equally amusing homage to Breakfast at Tiffany’s where our Golightly is not shopping for jewellery but a Ferrari which she takes on a hair raising test drive through the streets of Taipei, much to the pulse racing car salesman’s chagrin.
The use of Mancini’s Moon River that segues into the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black is a nice aural touch.
The nuts and bolts of the narrative, the chassis if you will, is an unlikely reunion. John is a pit-bull American DEA agent married to his job. Joey is a former top “Transporter” in Taipei, now married to the mob. They have history.
Now, 15 years later, fate puts Joey and John on a collision course during a weekend in Taipei.
Riffing on The Transporter films from twenty years ago, WEEKEND IN TAIPEI has great promise as a fun B grade for the first hour but runs out of gas.
Luke Evans is serviceable as John but he is not Jason Stratham and his fellow Fast and Furious costar, Sung Kang (ironically dispatched in that series by Stratham) chews up the scenery in Z grade villainy.
Gwei Lun Mei as Joey fares better as the sassy cunning stunt lead foot with nerves of steel and a heart of glass, with some smart scene stealing work by Wyatt Young as her sparky, spiky son.
Directed by George Huang, still searching for the mojo that fired his debut feature, Swimming with Sharks, WEEKEND IN TAIPEI is written by George Huang & Luc Besson, slumming it somewhat, putting metal to the pedal early on but letting the picture idle towards its dull denouement.