The Chinese WW2 spy thriller \u201cDecoded\u201d 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, \u201cDecoded\u201d 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\u2019s best known for his goofy mega-blockbuster \u201cDetective Chinatown\u201d comedies. With \u201cDecoded,\u201d a plodding adaptation of Mai Jia\u2019s popular source novel, Chen and Liu abandon cheap-seats humor\u2014Liu co-starred in the \u201cDetective Chinatown\u201d movies, playing a straight man to comedian Wang Baoqiang\u2014to pursue a more sober, but less convincing type of cornball power fantasy.<\/p>\n
Liu also played a frustrated, but superhumanly gifted wallflower in \u201cDetective Chinatown.\u201d He was more convincing in those movies, partly because he was part of a winning buddy duo, but also because he wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s performance as the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash in \u201cA Beautiful Mind.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Liu\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s introverted protagonist. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s dreams overtake his waking life, which sinks \u201cDecoded\u201d deeper into a familiar and generally watchable scenario about a solitary genius\u2019s triumph over impossible-seeming odds. But for a while, \u201cDecoded\u201d diligently and very slowly follows the various steps that lead Jinzhen along his defining quest to solve the Black Cipher. <\/p>\n
Jinzhen passively tumbles from one encounter to the next throughout this 2.5-hour long dud. He\u2019s 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. \u201cI hate war,\u201d Liseiwicz declares at the end of an awkwardly phrased and negligibly dramatized speech. He\u2019s soon forced to work for the American National Security Agency, for whom he devises increasingly difficult encryption methods, including the Black Cipher. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Chinese WW2 spy thriller \u201cDecoded\u201d 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, \u201cDecoded\u201d provides a dramatic change of pace for two marquee-worthy names: soft-spoken heart-throb Liu Haoran, who takes an unusual …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[45,55,37],"class_list":["post-1519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-drama","tag-history","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}