I Come with the Rain

Crap. This is a strange collection of scenes and themes linked together only by the director's fancy. An ex-cop suffering from PTS is employed by the world's largest pharma co. to look for the owner's son, a son who apparently cannot die like the cheerleader from heroes, in a Philipines and a HongKong where all locals speak only in heavily accented English.... amongst themselves....even in private. Avoid.

Along similar lines to Oldboy in how the director twists genre conventions, this anti thriller is not for everyone, but it is an oddly compelling film; taking the genre film in unexpected directions, it is compelling and fresh in its approach. It is another Anh Hung Tran film which centres on emotional interactions and heartbreak; the only difference is that its about extreme violence, serial killers and Christian messiahs instead of sisterly relationships.

Beautiful music and images, but what the hell is going on?

A mess of a film that becomes more understandable when you think of it as a character study and just treat the suspense/thriller aspects as a means to satisfy. Allegorical readings into certain characters are required to make sense of a lot of this - and it's pretty embarrassingly done for someone I admire as much as Anh Hung Tran. The pacing of it is also seriously off.

Anh Hung Tran is like Paul Thomas Anderson in a sense of how ambitious, unorthodox and bold this film is. Difference is that after all those crazy whirls, back-flips and hyper-twists PTA always manages to gracefully land down, and Hung Tran falls on his face, hard, multiple times. I honestly loved this film and hated it at the same time, but one thing I know for sure - it's been a long while since I actually felt every minute of the film in my guts. Truly visceral experience.

While clearly a step down from Tran's best work, and obviously compromised to at least some degree (hence Tran's semi-disowning of it), it still feels harsh to pan this while at the same time praising television shows like True Detective for doing more or less the same thing. A better comparison though might be late-period Michael Mann remaking Manhunter? That said, this unfortunately also has some of the clunkiest religious symbolism this side of a Kim Ki-Duk film.

Beautiful music, some good pictures and really great play by Hartnett. Whole plot very odd. Ending has some symbolic meanings but don't know how's that connected with this one?

A goddamn mess. Part Hong Kong cop thriller; a small part, which is unfortunate, because that might have been its best chance at success. A much larger part is a clichéd and stupid serial killer flick. And wrapped up in all this is a horribly labored religious allegory. It's an unsatisfying, confusing, boring mish-mash. There is a germ of a good idea here, and a few of the images are quite striking but I'm still tremendously let down.