During the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, a postman poses as a photo developer, helping Japanese forces while secretly sheltering Chinese refugees. He later risks his life evacuating them and revealing evidence of the atrocities.
Rated 4.0 / 5 from 1 log on Katalog
Going for another review on a movie about the Nanjing Massacre after City of Life and Death (which was a superior film, in my opinion, and will come back to comparing at the end of this review). I’m going to go on a long binge of comedies and feel-good films after this. Dead to Rights has a fascinating premise, it’s about a group of Chinese survivors who hide out in a photography studio during the Nanjing Massacre. Essentially, one character is given the opportunity to expose the carnage inflicted by the Japanese army. I’m not going to go into much detail on the plot. Dead to Rights was very anxiety-provoking, tense, well-acted, and portrayed the brutality in a way that wasn’t gratuitous. I did feel like the ending was a bit tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film, but I do not want to spoil it in my review. It’s hard to say whether or not I “enjoyed” a movie of this nature, but there is something cathartic about China looking its traumatic 20th century past in the eye and telling its stories on a scale like this. Worth a watch for sure, but this movie certainly has a more “Hollywood approach” to telling its story compared to City of Life and Death, which at times just felt like you were inserted into the chaos and forced to bare witness to it all. There’s academic theory on how to ‘correctly’ portray war in film, but I think as I watch more and more I tend to lean towards the grittier stories.
