Generally speaking, there is a positive correlation between the reputation of a theater movie and the box office. To put it more bluntly, comments on various social media, ratings on ticket purchase websites and Douban often determine the box office of a movie. But " silently kills " directed by Ke Wenli and starring Zhang Junning, Wang Chuanjun, Cai Ming, etc. seems to be another exception. The last exception may be " Chinatown Detective 3" directed by "Silence" producer Chen Sicheng. With a low score of 5.3 on Douban, it finally grossed 4.5 billion yuan at the box office during the 2021 Spring Festival. Why is this crime movie, whose reputation has been declining in the two weeks since its release, still able to collect nearly 1 billion yuan in box office in the relatively sluggish summer season of 2024?
"Silent Kill" is a remake. Director Ke Wenli shot his first feature film "Silent Kill" as early as 2018. The creation originated from a social news he saw - his daughter after school. She didn't go home, but the surveillance showed that her daughter had returned to the building. Her mother went to each house to ask, and finally found her in a garbage bag under the bed of a house. In fact, the neighbors all heard the noise, but they thought it might just be a household matter. No one stopped it, called the police, or told my mother. This is the graduation work of the director during his postgraduate period. It was featured in the "Chinese New Style" section of the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2023. It currently has a score of 7.8 on Douban and has a good reputation. The original film laid a good foundation for this remake. Ke Wenli used a new cast with more box office appeal, but still retained the basis of the previous film in terms of content. The story of the new work takes place in a school called "Jinghua Girls' High School" on a small Pacific island. The girl Chen Yutong (played by Wang Shengdi) belongs to a special group and has been bullied on campus for a long time. Although Li Han (played by Zhang Junning), the mother of a female worker at school, tried her best to protect her daughter, it was to no avail. The strange thing is that the girls who bullied Chen Yutong disappeared one by one, and soon, Chen Yutong also disappeared. With the intervention of the police, a man named Lin Zaifu (played by Wang Chuanjun) came into the sight of the police and Li Han. As the plot develops, there is a hidden secret behind every character involved in the case, and there are layers of reversals. It seems like there are no good people anymore.
Admittedly, "Silence" is not a bad movie. It continues the style of the movie "Manslaughter" directed by Ke Wenli in 2019, with special emphasis on "strong plot and fast pace." Especially different from the general suspense crime genre films, "Silent Kill" does not simply stop at solving the case analysis, but digs into the complex motives and respective situations of each character in this murder. For example, the police chief Dai Guodong played by Wu Zhenyu neglected to educate his son, turning the latter into an unscrupulous person who likes to hide in the dark and secretly take photos; Li Han seems to love his daughter deeply, but he has always believed in "keeping his daughter safe" since he was a child. "For" long-term "domestic violence" against Chen Yutong; Fang Juezhong, played by Jin Shijie, preaches to others all day long, but in fact he is a weak person at heart. The exploration of human nature enriches the connotation of the character and highlights the theme of "sometimes silence can kill" that Ke Wenli wants to express. Indifference that has nothing to do with oneself has largely led to the tragedy, and also made the film It has the function of enlightenment and warning.
But why is it that such a movie with "layers of reversal" and can continue to bring visual and emotional impact to the audience only scored 6.4 points on Douban, which is inconsistent with its box office results? Perhaps it is precisely because of its emphasis on "strong plot and fast pace" that it is like a hot pot with heavy oil, spicy and salt. It may stimulate the taste buds of diners for a while, but it may also be just a pile of stale ingredients. In "Silent Kill", there is almost no normal person, it can even be said that there is no good person, and the expression of love is twisted and cruel. The director stews all the social issues that the audience can think of, such as school violence, domestic violence, sexual assault of girls, and people with disabilities, which have easily triggered online discussions in recent years, and stimulates the audience's nerves with highly purposeful shots and soundtracks, even It can be said that in some passages, close-ups are abused to magnify the ugly appearance.
"Excessive force" is sometimes a pity for a young director, and sometimes it is a "traffic password" in the short video era.Superficial sensationalism, low-level excitement, outrageous acting skills, and an AI-generated script made the movie a short video and made the audience frustrated. (Sun Jiayin)
