This time, no poultry was harmed in Dung Luong Dinh's film which – like his previous one “Drowsy City” did back in 2019 – competes for the Grand Prix in the Official Selection of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Instead of feathers, there are lots of fists and bullets flying in “Magnum 578”, Dinh's first attempt at a full blooded action thriller that challenged us with the extensive filtering, and literally – the tiniest of violins incessantly vibrating from the opening credits to the closing scene. It would be interesting to find out why the film's composer Dong-jun Lee thought that it would be a good idea to set the melodramatic tunes to a story full of action, wild chases through the Vietnamese mountains and kung-fu bashings. It's like having Mariah Carey falsetto-ing through “The Fast and The Furious” on loop.
It is an overall challenging film in its narrative and visual form. The best scenes involve heavy action and no dialogues, with iron-fist kung-fu scenes exploding into a giant spectacle. This is not all that surprising, having in mind that Dung Luong Dinh is a kung-fu master himself, who as such also knows how to find his fighters and direct them in action. While some of the actors had to go through an intense, three-weeks long training, the others are famous sportists, including the martial arts legend Anh Tuan Hac, and a wrestling champion who plays the impressively threatening-looking bad guy. Unfortunately, once all the fisticuffs and biker gangs are gone, the tiny violin immediately strikes its tear-jerking chords.
When his six-year-old daughter (Thanh Thao) gets kidnapped and abused by the son of a big mafia boss, a former special force kick-ass agent turned truck driver immediately transfigures into a revenge machine. Our lead man Hung, too sexy for that truck driver's checkered shirt, is played by the French actor of Vietnamese origin Alexandre Nguyen who probably had to prove he was right for the role by his ability to fill a bathtub with tears. The pathos in the movie is overwhelmingly present, disrupting the quality of the story. There are certainly many reasons to be emotional about the atrocious nature of the crime committed upon a small girl, it is the proportion of herz-schmerz applied in the movie, and not just regarding Nguyen's character. Sugar-coated scenes of the father-daughter relationship that often recur in the form of flashbacks, belong in TV novellas, the candy-colour palette to depict them included. If the strong colors feel welcome when lush greenery and curvy roads cutting through the hills fill the screen, they turn the other parts of the movie in a fairy-tale like scenery unfitting for the actual place of crime.
“Magnum 578” is a mixed bag of tropes that do not belong together. If it had less of extensive emotional suffering to underline the obvious, and a bit of a break from the fiddle, this lavishly produced film would have found a large international audience. At the same time, it gives us big hopes of seeing the next action movie by Dung Luong Dinh whose exercise in it might be very flawed, but has great martial arts value. The locations scouted for the film are absolutely impressive, so are the drone takes of the breath-takingly beautiful nature. The stability of the camera is also something that one has learned to appreciate in the past ten+ years, and the job done by DP Morgan Schmidt is solid in its technical execution. His fine feeling for the fast-pacing action was already pulpable in Le-Van Kiet's “Furie” (2019).
One should not forget that Dinh's truly accomplished, multiple-awarded debut “Father and Son” was Vietnam's submission for the Foreign-Language Oscars, and that his curious search for new topics and genres made him create three films completely different in style and topics. One thing is sure – all the mentioned imperfections are the material that make “Magnum 578” a film unseen before.
