(Spoilers ahead—enter at your own risk!!)
The most chilling detail in Detective Chinatown 2 is this: if the coroner successfully kills the fifth person, can he actually attain immortality?
If he cannot attain immortality in the first place, then the coroner is nothing more than a lunatic with a broken brain.
When a mystery story chalks the motive up to the killer’s mental breakdown, it falls flat—the audience wants a rational motive for murder.
But what if he really can attain immortality?
The idea of using Taoist magic to make elixirs and cultivate immortality was clearly borrowed from Double Vision (I don’t know whether the name Lu Guofu, played by Wang Xun, was also Chen Sicheng’s spur-of-the-moment way of borrowing the name of Double Vision’s director, Chen Kuo-fu).
And all the clues in Double Vision suggest that if the killer succeeds, he really can attain immortality in the end, so the motive for murder is entirely rational.
So only if we accept the premise that the coroner really can attain immortality does the Taoist-magic murder case in Detective Chinatown 2 truly hold together—and the film’s quality would rise another notch as a result.
In this case, the more supernatural it is, the less absurd it actually feels.
So, in Detective Chinatown 2, which premise did Chen Sicheng actually intend to use?
I think that depends on whether the worldview of the “Detective Chinatown Universe” is supernatural.
At first glance, Tencent NOW, CAR Inc., hackers, Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York”……the “Detective Chinatown Universe” seems thoroughly mundane.
But Master Mo Youqian clearly uses the art of flying through the air (and no wires, by the way), while the Indian detective clearly uses telekinesis to help the protagonists break out of prison—you dare say there are no supernatural powers in the “Detective Chinatown Universe”? It is basically a surreal universe!
So, the conclusion is:
If the coroner successfully kills the fifth person, he really can attain immortality!
……And if he doesn’t attain immortality, it’s only because he has never seen the 1986 version of Journey to the West and didn’t arrange the alchemy furnaces in a row.
You know, ever since Hanson and the Beast, monsters have been allowed to become spirits after the founding of the People’s Republic.
If they’re allowed to become spirits, what’s so impressive about becoming an immortal?
It really is a new era, isn’t it.
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