In a snowy backdrop of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, Cliff Walkers follows four Chinese Communist Party agents who parachute back to Harbin in the early 1930s. The four are split into two groups with their loved ones exchanged to avoid capture or sell out. The agents embark on a secret mission named “Utrennya” to extract a former prisoner who could expose the unethical human experimentation conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army to the international community. But things go south when the first group realizes that they are sold out by a traitor, and they’re surrounded by threats on all sides.
From the opening sequence itself, Cliff Walkers leads you into a lavishly hypnotic world where every step taken by our characters might be their last. At every turn, there is a threat that could expose them, and to fulfill their mission they have to be careful and trust their fellow partner to survive this blitz. Director Zhang Yimou tries to create an exciting game of cat and mouse with every tool of an espionage thriller influenced by classical Hollywood movies. But there is a rush in his way of storytelling that it immediately starts to overwhelm the viewer.
Yimou uses his characters in a way that we get very little time to get to know them to have any emotional bond. As the plot thickens, it becomes incredibly hard to keep track of who is doing what. Many things are happening all at once, from the betrayals and the secret codes to the double agents. Then, every time a sequence starts to build, it ends on an underwhelming note.
Coming to the performances, the actors do their best with what they are given, especially Yu Hewei who plays Zhou Yi, a CCP agent embedded within the enemy, and Qin Hailu as Wang Yu, a comrade and Zhang’s wife played by Zhang Yi, a former journalist-turned CCP agent. For a movie that is trying to expose torture done by the Imperial Japanese Army, it does fall short in its antagonist Gao Bin, played by Ni Dahong, whose motivations like our protagonist lie with his country, his actions and decisions are where it all comes crashing own. He is neither intimidating nor threatening. He is more of a bureaucrat following his orders.
There is an inherent excitement that comes with the spy thriller genre: The edge-of-your-seat feeling, the misdirections cue in, the characters, their betrayals, action set pieces, and the final reveal. These are a few of the ingredients that make an espionage story interesting. Cliff Walkers does have that but all on the surface level. Yimou tries earnestly to give a story worth remembering even with the CCP nationalist propaganda injected in.
Given all that, Cliff Walkers still manages to be a visually stunning treat. It is a movie that you go to with big expectations given Yimou’s filmography. And for a one-time watch, it does its job. But given its setting and premise, there was so much that could have been done, especially with the characters who, like the movie goes on, all feel the same. Cliff Walkers gives you the feeling of unwrapping a surprise gift with all that enthusiasm only to find out inside it was nothing but a gift card for a Subway sandwich.
