Let’s admit it: the decade is positively lousy with thrillers promising you the world—exotic cities full of neon menace, chase scenes that squeal across your eardrums, a hero whose jaw is clenched so tight you’re dying for a punchline. I came to “Weekend in Taipei” burdened with the memory of a hundred similar action diversions, armor already up, braced for kinetic tourism and the odd (perhaps unintentional) laugh. And what do you know? George Huang’s high-velocity tryst with Luc Besson not only left my armor in the dust—it made me care, and worse, it made me happy.
This isn’t your obligatory “drab cop in a strange land, gun in one hand, trauma in the other” cheap-shot. Here, in Taipei’s moist, lightning-lit air, you get what so few action movies allow: exuberance, genuine warmth, a sparkle in the mayhem—the sense that perhaps, for a few hours at least, you can be swept along and occasionally surprised. Sure, the premise is as old as movie time—a burnt-out DEA agent on the scent of a criminal billionaire, gangs swarming like ants through alleyways, betrayals throttling out of the blue. I’ve seen it. You’ve seen it. But not quite like this.
Luke Evans, smoldering as ever, stomps onto the scene as John Lawlor, dragged from a botched Minnesota op into Taipei’s electric labyrinth by the slim hope of closure. The plot skitters: there are emails in the night, a ledger that shifts hands more often than a hot dumpling, and a family secret that pirouettes from melodrama to—astonishingly—real emotional resonance. Predictable? At times. But “Weekend in Taipei” zips along with such insistence, you surrender to its rhythm. The twists—some lifted wholesale from the glossary of genre, others tossed in with a wink—rarely feel perfunctory. Even when you foresee the corners, the movie rounds them with the smooth assurance of a stunt driver who wants you to scream, then laugh, then just breathe.
The glory, though, is in the attention to backdrop. Taipei, in Huang’s hands, isn’t just scenic detritus. It thrums. Day or night, the city is both threat and invitation—each chase throwing headlights over puddled alleys, each quiet moment reminding you that this mad carousel is lived-in, not merely borrowed.
Here’s where the movie startles. Wyatt Yang as Raymond, the impossibly likable son caught between rotten fate and his own good-hearted subterfuge, is the sort of audience surrogate I secretly crave. He’s got face and spark; the performance skirts cliché and falls headlong into something alive: humor playing tag with humiliation, hope waltzing with defeat. The flashbacks—oh, that long hair—manage to splatter the screen with both pathos and comedy, a rare dance indeed.
And how delicious to watch Sung Kang, so often cast as the steely-eyed hero, devour the villain role. He makes villainy positively appetizing—by turns charming, wounded, and almost admirable; the sort of kingpin you could imagine sharing a bottle of whiskey with if you weren’t so terribly afraid of his knives. You sense a man who, criminal or not, cares fiercely—the fatal flaw of all the best movie monsters.
Evans, for his part, does what Evans does best: swagger, smolder, then reveal a streak of wounded puppy under all that muscle. His chemistry with Gwei Lun-mei (a mercenary behind the wheel, a woman with history furrowing her brows) is less fireworks, more the steady burn of regret and what-might-have-been. When the movie finally presses them together, you don’t roll your eyes—you hope for them, because the film, miraculously, bothers to ask you to.
It’s easy to bludgeon an action film with busyness, let the bullets drown out every sigh or smile. Huang, to his credit, trusts his set-pieces to dazzle but doesn’t let them strangle character. The car chases, sharp as razors and loaded with Fast-and-Furious bombast, are more than demo reels for the location scouts—they’re about peril, sure, but also connection, frustration, need. I found myself, embarrassingly, wishing for even more knife-fighting—precise, breathless supernovas of choreography courtesy of Alain Figlarz, that left me thumping the armrest and praying for just thirty more seconds.
Huang never loses control. He keeps the tone fleet where others would go ponderous, never allowing emotional beats to become sludge, nor letting the tempo catapult us into exhaustion. This is a thriller with a decided pulse: exciting, yes, but not heartless.
Let’s speak, too, for the script—often the Achilles’ heel of these global cop capers. “Weekend in Taipei” lets its characters laugh, not just at the world but at themselves. The banter is lithe, never forced, and when the movie leans into absurdity (a flashback mop-top worthy of cartoon parody), you can almost hear the filmmakers admitting, “Yes, we know this is ridiculous, but isn’t it fun?” The laughter, curiously enough, never undercuts the gravity of reunion or regret but amplifies it, making the emotional climaxes land without the sour aftertaste of manipulation.
And what a theme, quietly worked through all the carnage: the impossibility of family, the wound of deception, the stubborn, ludicrous hope of starting again. The final music cues—a dollop of reflective melancholy—bring the film’s journey to a lovely, tentative close. You don’t expect redemption in a genre addicted to vengeance, but here, it lingers, sweet as lychee at the end of a spicy meal.
So where do we land? “Weekend in Taipei” is ragged in places, yes—its plot sometimes works from the paint-by-numbers handbook of Luc Besson’s Euro-action experiments. But when it soars, it’s because everyone involved, from Evans to Kang to director Huang, is rooting for your entertainment, not your resignation. This picture understands momentum, but it remembers joy.
If what you want is to be throttled then consoled, thrilled but also invited to care, then skip your listless multiplex pap and book a ticket here. I came with modest hopes—and left with a grin. Sometimes, that’s all the movies need to do.
