The Chinese WW2 spy thriller “Decoded” stands out for a number of reasons, mostly in spite of its conventional and hackneyed depiction of a troubled mathematician who deciphers encrypted messages for the mainland army. For starters, “Decoded” provides a dramatic change of pace for two marquee-worthy names: soft-spoken heart-throb Liu Haoran, who takes an unusual leading man role as the gifted, but painfully shy codebreaker Rong Jinzhen; and director Chen Sicheng, who’s best known for his goofy mega-blockbuster “Detective Chinatown” comedies. With “Decoded,” a plodding adaptation of Mai Jia’s popular source novel, Chen and Liu abandon cheap-seats humor—Liu co-starred in the “Detective Chinatown” movies, playing a straight man to comedian Wang Baoqiang—to pursue a more sober, but less convincing type of cornball power fantasy.
Liu also played a frustrated, but superhumanly gifted wallflower in “Detective Chinatown.” He was more convincing in those movies, partly because he was part of a winning buddy duo, but also because he wasn’t trying to capital-A act while wearing hairpieces, whose synthetic hairs thin at an alarming rate as his character ages. As Jinzhen, Liu brings to mind Russell Crowe’s performance as the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind.” That association gets harder and harder to shake as Jinzhen inevitably loses his grip on reality while trying to solve the Black Cipher, a nigh-impossible encryption key that was specifically designed to stump Jinzhen.
Liu’s mostly compelling as a leading man whenever he can suggest a lot about Jinzhen by speaking softly and deferring his gaze, as if Jinzhen expects to be reprimanded or inconvenienced at any time. He’s still often eclipsed by co-star John Cusack, whose broad and twitchy performance often distracts from his dialogue, as well as a series of campy dream sequences that ostensibly speak for Liu’s introverted protagonist.
Jinzhen keeps a dream journal to help him break complex ciphers since the Freud-friendly symbols that he encounters in his dreams also help him to think out of the proverbial box. These dreams frequently hint at tensions that never gets resolved beyond portentous signs and awkwardly rendered computer graphics. Eventually, Jinzhen’s dreams overtake his waking life, which sinks “Decoded” deeper into a familiar and generally watchable scenario about a solitary genius’s triumph over impossible-seeming odds. But for a while, “Decoded” diligently and very slowly follows the various steps that lead Jinzhen along his defining quest to solve the Black Cipher.
Jinzhen passively tumbles from one encounter to the next throughout this 2.5-hour long dud. He’s first discovered by a distant relative, university professor Xiaolili (Daniel Wu), who adopts and nurtures Jinzhen. Then Jinzhen comes to the attention of Professor Liesiwicz (Cusack), a manic, but philosophically-inclined computational mathematics professor who refuses to collaborate with the Kuomingtang. “I hate war,” Liseiwicz declares at the end of an awkwardly phrased and negligibly dramatized speech. He’s soon forced to work for the American National Security Agency, for whom he devises increasingly difficult encryption methods, including the Black Cipher.
Jinzhen’s also reluctantly forced to crack codes for a world government, but he’s ok with it, since he occasionally recalls the unbelievable civics lessons that Xiaolili imparted to him in establishing scenes, in between one-sided chess games and stillborn dialogue exchanges with Liesiwicz. Jinzhen’s recruited by Director Zheng (Chen Daoming), a shadowy Chinese G-man whose pronounced limp and unyielding dialogue substitutes for an actual personality. Then Jinzhen’s sequestered in a secret government compound, where he develops a perfunctory romance with Xiaomei (Krystal Ren), whom he proposes to using hand-written cyphers and also sleeps with following a pseudo-suggestive exchange (“Layer by layer, the truth is unveiled”).
There’s no sex in “Decoded,” by the way. Instead, there are a lot of tacky, lavishly animated dream sequences, which often look like overproduced screensavers. Sometimes Jinzhen dreams about ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a wall-sized HAL-9000-type computer that taunts Jinzhen in fluent Mandarin by yelling cryptic things like, “You will never understand us.” Other times, Jinzhen dreams about the Beatles, since their song “I Am the Walrus” mysteriously holds the key to the Black Cipher. Unfortunately, it’s only so much fun to watch a sweaty, out-of-breath Jinzhen get chased around by four unconvincing Beatles stand-ins, who at one point sing, through imprecisely translated English subtitles: “I am the egg guy. We are the egg guys. I am the manatee.”
Liu doesn’t exactly light up the screen in his limited capacity as a humanoid plot device. His character either reacts to or follows after whatever promising new development might help Jinzhen to solve the latest problem that’s vexing him. The filmmakers do what they can to compensate for their unlikely hero’s prevailing lack of charm and agency, but not even the combined forces of Lloyd Dobler and the Fab Four can bring a spike of joy to this DOA period drama.
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