Plot mashup doesn’t mesh
“The Jade Pendant,” a soapy Western about Chinese immigrants in 1870s America, hasn’t a nuanced bone in its body, and it unabashedly pans for melodrama as if it were gold. It’s sometimes laughable, but it’s not boring.
The action begins in China, where a young woman ( Clara Lee) escapes a violent arranged marriage and decides on her honeymoon night to take the next boat to San Francisco. To pay for her passage, she unwittingly agrees to work in a brothel, but her kung fu powers quickly impress the madam ( Tsai Chin), who christens her “Peony” and spares her from turning tricks.
Soon, Peony meets the impossibly handsome Tom ( Godfrey Gao), who runs a nearby chop suey restaurant. But the local crime boss ( Tzi Ma) is madly in love with Peony, and will stop at nothing to have her.
And these are just a few of the plot strands in this film, which attempts to mount an epic love story amid a real- life, historic event: the horrific lynching of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles in 1871. The problem is, there are too many things going on, and the massacre seems almost tacked on to the movie.
Director Leong Po- Chih begins his movie with a foreboding cue card that expresses how Chinese folks were mistreated at the hands of the Americans during the Gold Rush and the building of the railroads. A rich topic, but “The Jade Pendant” spends much of its time dramatizing how the Chinese mistreated each other. We see very little of gold panning, and even less of the railroads. By the time we get to Los Angeles and the impending bloodbath, the film has gone off the tracks.
The international cast is appealing, even though the characters are paper- thin, and the script gives the actors nothing but cliches. We find ourselves often cringing at the spectacle, but still watching anyway.