You know that sinking feeling you get when you're in some trendy upscale shop and suddenly the in-house BGM features some absolutely crap Euro-house remix of one of your most cherished pop songs? Well, that's exactly the feeling you'll get watching director Zhang Yimou's latest, "A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop," which is a remake of the Coen Brothers' 1984 debut, "Blood Simple".
"Blood Simple" was a tight, suspenseful small-town noir, with great performances from a then-unknown Frances McDormand and M. Emmet Walsh, precisely hardboiled dialogue and a cool, brutal logic to its escalation of events. Zhang's remake is something like an unfunny chop-socky Three Stooges version of the material.
Like the original, Zhang's film focuses on an unfaithful wife, her jealous husband and the investigator he hires to murder his wife and her lover. Yet the original film's strength was the believability of its Texas watering-hole location and its scheming characters who all think themselves cleverer than the viewer does. Zhang's version moves the action to a remote desert noodle shop in 18th-century China; as usual for a Zhang film, the cinematography and set design are a riot of bold colors, but the director pumps everything else up into cartoonish proportions as well, with disastrous results.