Decoded
The plot of the Chinese WW2 spy drama Decoded is peculiar for a number of reasons, mostly defying its otherwise cliched portrayal of a mathematician who helps the mainland army to solve intercepted coded messages. For starters, Decoded offers a quite different role to two stars: the soft-speaking heartthrob Liu Haoran, who sometimes portrays girls’ heartthrob as he plays a codebreaker, Rong Jinzhen, who is extremely modest and suffers from stage fright and the director Chen Sicheng, who has previously directed the madcap Detective Chinatown films to near perfection. In Decoded, one of the dull retellings of a famous novel by Mai Jia, Chen and Liu give up the sitcom quotable humor that Liu has become accustomed to while playing in the Detective China Town movies to follow Liu’s more convincing lead.
In “Detective Chinatown,” Liu also performed this role as an exasperated, yet extremely gifted wallflower. At least he was more convincing in those films because he was part of a successful buddy duo, but also because he wasn’t attempting to capital. A act while donning multiple hairpieces, each with a layer of synthetic hair that thinned dramatically each year as the character progressed in age. In Jinzhen, Liu reminds of Russell Crowe in his role of the paranoid schizophrenia mathematician John Nash in ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ As it turns out, that association is only going to be stronger and stronger in most viewers minds as the character Jinzhen, the character’s grip on reality starts to unravel as he tries to decipher the Black Cipher, which is a ‘what were they thinking’ type of encryption key that Jinen was designed specifically to frustrate him.
Whenever Liu is being cast as a leading man, he replicates softly speaking as suggesting ways how Jinzhen could act, his head lowered as if he could get into trouble at any second which was the case in most scenes. He is still beaten to the punch more often than not with co-star John Cusack and his wide and twitchy performance, oftentimes leaving his dialogue inaudible, including a bunch of low-budget, campy dream cutscenes that supposedly represents Liu’s shy peasant character.
Jinzhen maintains a dream log intended to assist him in solving complicated ciphers since the same Freud symbols he meets in his sleep allows him to think literally out of the box. More often than not these dreams suggest overhanging tensions which never see resolution beyond some signboards and poorly produced 3d animations. As a consequence, there’s a turn in the film whereby Jinzhen’s dreams usurp his life in the film “Decoded,” which unfortunately up to this point has narrated the typical story of struggling genius who beats the odds. For a short period of time, Decoded does a good job in tracing, albeit very tedious, the numerous steps that lead Jinzhen in search of the Black Cipher.
Jinzhen goes from one meeting to another passively throughout this disappointed 2.5 hours movie. He is for instance taken in by a distant relative, university lecturer Xiaolili (Daniel Wu), who adopts and supports Jinzhen. Out of nowhere, Janzhen catches the eye of Professor Liesiwicz (Cusack), an obsessive yet philosophical computer foreign scientist refusing to work with the Kuomingtang. “I hate war,” Liseiwicz states at the end of a poorly structured yet dramatically animated ‘drama’. Straight away, he is later on compelled to work for the American National Security Agency for whom he constructs more and more sophisticated methods of encryption including the Black Cipher.
Jinzhen is also compelled, albeit unwillingly, to break ciphers for a global regime. Nevertheless, it does not bother him, as he sometimes remembers the astonishing civics lessons that Xiaolili gave him for creating the scenes while chess games and senseless conversations with Liesiwicz were going on. Jinzhen’s bludgeoned into joining Director Zheng’s (Chen Daoming) Organization. Zheng is a Chinese type that is mostly absent of personal traits except for a pronounced limp and an uncaring way of talking without ever providing any further engagement. Then Jinzhen is whisked away to a clandestine government ‘community’, where one more reasonably calls it a business-like relationship with Xiaomei (Krystal Ren), whom he proposes marriage to with letters written in code and in bed after a not- so subtle exchange through which the “layers and layers conceal the revealing of the flock”.
Also, let it be noted that there is no sex in “Decoded.” What there is instead, are far too many cheap looking, overly robust animated fantasies that, at times, resemble nothing more than tacky screensavers of a high production value. Sometimes Jinzhen has dreams featuring ENIAC, which is the wall-sized HAL-9000 type and seems able to speak a number of things including “You will never understand us” with a very strong Chinese accent. Other times Jinzhen is dreaming about the Beatles because he has found that the song ‘I Am the Walrus’ has the answer to the Black Cipher that he is looking for. But this footage alone is hardly enough entertainment as watching a heavily perspiring out of breath Jinzhen being sent in circles by four terrible impersonators of the Beatles who at some point manage to sing “I am the egg guy. We are the egg guys. I am the manatee.” with poorly dubbed English subtitles.
As for Liu, well no, Liu does not shine in this aspect of his performance but rather does so in ‘his’ as a misCast humanoid prop in this monotonous mix. His character, rather very conveniently, waits for a time when he might be needed and constantly seeks out all new activities that lead him to the next stage of the problem-solving process of Jinzhen.
As much as the filmmakers try to make their rather uninspiring protagonist relatable and even somewhat inspiring, not even the combined efforts of Lloyd Dobler and the Fab Four manage to inject some much needed joy into this dour period drama that is pretty much already dead on arrival.
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