The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+
I have a soft spot for Chinese fantasy films. While I often have no fucking clue what’s happening in terms of plot, Chinese movies are rarely boring and A Writer’s Odyssey is a solid example. Does it make sense? Hell no. Do bizarre plot elements appear and disappear without explanation? Hell yes. But A Writer’s Odyssey throws so many half-baked ideas at you that you hardly have time to think about any of them. It’s just a ridiculous bombardment of nonsense that’s also a fun way to spend a couple of hours as long as you don’t spend too much time thinking about anything.
I’m going to largely focus on the plot, but I don’t see a need for a spoiler alert because I don’t think I understand what happened. Broadly speaking, A Writer’s Odyssey deals with the idea of reality intersecting with the world of a novel. Think The Neverending Story or In the Mouth of Madness if neither of them made much sense. We start with a man (don’t know his name, so I’ll just call him Main Guy) whose daughter was kidnapped six years ago. Meanwhile, the CEO of a major corporation has become convinced that he is the real-life avatar for the villain in a fantasy novel and that he will die if the villain dies in the novel. How and why does he arrive at this insane conclusion? No fucking idea. But he directs his CIO to recruit Main Guy to kill the author before he finishes the novel and, presumably, kills the villain at the end of the story. Why Main Guy? I’m going to devote a paragraph to that because it’s glorious. So the rest of the film switches back and forth from Main Guy trying to kill the author in the real world and the heroes of the novel trying to kill the fantasy villain in the fantasy world. Some real people become characters in the novel, some don’t. I don’t know why.
The explanation for selecting Main Guy for this task was my favorite part of the film and literally made me laugh out loud numerous times. This movie, briefly and without explanation, becomes the shittiest version of X-Men ever. We are briefly shown three people with superpowers that are candidates for the mission; one has an amazingly specific invulnerability to electricity and one guy either has super strength or super speed, depending on what the situation calls for. The third is Main Guy who has the power to throw things hard. Not in a superhuman way, mind you. He just has a really good arm. They have a fucking dossier on him because he throws hard. Nevermind that the existence of “superpowers” is quickly glossed over and accepted as a common occurrence, Main Guy is a master assassin because he could be a minor league pitcher. This guy spends the movie just chucking rocks and golf balls at people and I can’t describe in words just how fucking ridiculous this is on film.
Despite making me feel like I had a head injury, the fantasy sequences in the film are well-done and entertaining in a logic-be-damned sort of way. The fight scenes are well-choreographed and the effects and costumes are effective, if a little over the top. The standout sequence is a massive battle involving man-made dragons launching tar at enemy combatants that is one of the most visually striking and unique things that I have seen in some time. The final battle with the fantasy villain is quite literally a boss battle from a video game, complete with a battle arena (that appears out of nowhere) and actions that need to be repeated to take down the big bad. They might as well have thrown in quick-time events. I’ve criticized movies in the past for looking like video games because of an overreliance on CGI, but this is quite literally a movie reproduction of a video game scene. It’s such a faithful and seemingly intentional reproduction of a video game experience that I have to give it some credit and the design of the villain is pretty damn cool and original.
The problem, once one abandons logic, is that the film grinds whenever it reverts back to the story in the real world. Other than Main Guy’s rock throwing ability, there isn’t enough going on in this plot to distract the audience from thinking about things too much. It’s like watching a detective story where none of the clues make sense and the detective just fumbles into nonsense by happenstance. By the end of the film, I still didn’t understand if the daughter was dead or not. I feel like I was supposed to know that.
A Writer’s Odyssey is a glorious trainwreck that serves as a nice change of pace from all of the dramas currently flooding theaters. While it doesn’t quite measure up to the pure insanity of older Chinese fantasy films like Fantasy Mission Force or The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, it is still ridiculous enough to adequately cure boredom. If you are into this kind of thing, go ahead. If you’re not familiar with Chinese fantasy films, welcome to the really weird party.
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