Film Name: 匿杀 / The Fire Raven
After the New Year release of “The Fire Raven” received such terrible reviews, I procrastinated for nearly a week before finally going to see it (don’t ask why I went despite knowing better—curiosity got the better of me)…
Having been thoroughly warned over the past week, I went in with zero expectations. While I wouldn’t call it shockingly awful, the film’s flaws are so glaringly obvious and cringe-worthy that it becomes increasingly tedious to watch—the biggest issue being that it bills itself as a “thriller/crime” genre piece without ever clearly defining what it actually wants to be.
I still hold some regard for director Ke Wenli. After all, he previously delivered the critically and commercially successful “Sheep Without a Shepherd.” Even his significant step back with “A Place Called Silence” still managed commendable emotional depth… But with “The Fire Raven,” you realize he suddenly can’t do anything right. It’s understandable that lacking an adapted screenplay for creative reworking might result in a less compelling plot, but how did even the most basic character relationships, logic, and emotional beats become such a mess?
Take the villains in the “*Kill” series, for instance. They’ve always favored using figures tied to power and privilege to highlight class disparities and structural oppression, making audiences empathize. Yet the ‘evil’ of these elites must at least be convincing. In “The Fire Raven,” the villains’ wickedness is pure mindlessness—evil for evil’s sake—reducing them to hollow labels awaiting judgment.
The film’s fictional setting also feels half-baked. While it avoids wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia this time, I simply can’t wrap my head around how a Pacific island nation could build an underground city. The same goes for the protagonist Fang Tianyang’s prosthetic leg—these details seem to serve a purpose, but ultimately feel utterly pointless.
Even Ke Wenli’s signature “pity-mongering and sentimentality” falls flat in The Fire Raven. Due to half-hearted character development, tragedy devolves into mere kitsch. And to serve a clumsy plot twist, the emotionally charged father-daughter bond is diluted into a mere symbolic tool. Audience reactions shift from “Oh, how tragic! They’re father and daughter!” ” to “Oh, they’re father and daughter.”
As for the plot, I never had high hopes for the detective work. But I never imagined that “The Fire Raven,” billed as a suspense thriller, would feel so disjointed—every so often, it lays out all the truths up to that point, only to jump to the next mystery and twist. It feels more like watching a series of short episodes stitched together than a cohesive film.
So when I thought the film was finally wrapping up, only to be hit with a scene of Chang Chun-ning and Wang Shengdi slaughtering villains in a fashionable exit—all for the sake of flaunting cheap, melodramatic gore—I felt utterly helpless in my frustration.
This is precisely what I meant earlier by “not knowing what it wants to be.” It fails at suspense, fails at emotional resonance, and fails at originality. Then it tries to piggyback on cult film aesthetics at the end. Does it really think it can pull off everything?