Ning Hao has had a rough time lately. After debuting his previous film, Crazy Racer, the Chinese director went on to make a film about a criminal defense lawyer stuck in the desert of China after winning a case for a falcon poacher. The film was rejected by the Chinese censorship boards for five years, forcing Ning Hao to cut and recut the film over and over again until, five years later, they finally approved a version for theatrical release. The final cut is somewhat of a mixed bag, with lots to love, and a lot that simply doesn’t work. But what’s clear is that the film was made by a director with nothing but earnest love for westerns, George Miller, and genre filmmaking as a whole.
The most notable aspect of No Man’s Land is the style and art direction, almost directly quoting the multitude of films that inspired it. It’s as if a Sergio Leone film and The Road Warrior got together and had a baby with the Coen Brothers’ sense of humor. The people of the desert wear worn-down leather coats, brandish knives and four-barrel hand cannons, and live in bizarre huts. The score evokes the trumpet solos of Ennio Morricone, and the tobacco-filtered amber color palette of the desert looks of-a-piece with Mexico in Breaking Bad. If nothing else, the film certainly evokes a certain mood, especially when placing the lead character in a world so very alien to him and his finely pressed suits. Hell, there’s even a Lee Van Cleef lookalike, playing the most Lee Van Cleef character ever put on screen. It’s the kind of film that feels far more interesting and fun in the abstract than what’s actually happening at any given moment on screen.
The storytelling is rather rote, and finds no inspiration from all the genres it culls from to make this standard redemption and morality play ever come off as anything other than marking time. Opening with a story about monkeys uniting for the common good as the birth of civilization, the film’s funnier, grittier moments are at odds with the redemption arc. The momentum continuously stalls out, opting for a bizarre “red light-green light” approach that makes the story feel like it never truly begins or ends, content only to happen in short bursts that rarely make up for the stuttered pacing. Compared to the films it draws from, it’s a rather sluggish affair, rarely offering up enough stylistic flourish or narrative hooks to keep the viewer engaged with what’s happening to the characters.
The real failings come into light by the finale, which has an opportunity to be incredibly satisfying and poignant, but only raises more questions than it answers, and tacks on a moralizing ending that is neither earned nor in keeping with anything that has come before. The creative art direction and unique locale can only sustain interest long enough before the tedium sets in, rushing things to a conclusion that is as uninteresting as what came before. That said, it’s hard not to appreciate everything leading up to the final scene, which is so painfully obvious in its visual metaphor that I actually felt like groaning out loud about it. It’s unfortunate that a film like this is unable, then, to achieve any of its potential due to government censors meddling with it. But one has to wonder, was the film all that much better beforehand? It certainly might have been more fun, but the moralization of the script feels like it was there from the start, only accentuated by pressure to do so.
