At The Movies: Mysteries and conspiracies abound in Lost In The Stars, They Cloned Tyrone

Lost In The Stars (PG13)

122 minutes, opens on Thursday

4 stars

The story: A honeymooning couple are on a South-east Asian island when the husband (Zhu Yilong) wakes up in the hotel next to a beautiful stranger (Janice Man) claiming to be his wife (Huang Ziqi). She is not, because he was just at the local police station to report his wife missing.

Produced and scripted by Chen Sicheng, creator of the popular Detective Chinatown comedy-mystery series (2015 to 2021), the outlandishly entertaining suspense drama Lost In The Stars has grossed US$482 million (S$641 million) and counting to be China’s mega-hit of the summer.

The vanishing-tourist yarn is a slick remake of the 1990 Soviet mystery Trap For A Lonely Man, based on a French stage play of the same title by Robert Thomas that has been filmed for American television thrice, between 1969 and 1990.

Master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock once optioned the rights.

And it is nothing if not Hitchcockian with its doppelganger and femme fatale.

Hong Kong star Man is dangerously slinky in the imposter role. How is it that the woman’s sham identity as the wife is corroborated by photo identification, the hotel staff and even the police inspector (Du Jiang)?

Zhu plays the panicky husband, a diving instructor, racing against time to find his spouse before his visitor visa expires. Ni Ni is all street smarts as the lawyer helping him navigate what seems to be a vast conspiracy.

They are a troika of terrific performances.

The picturesque beach resort throws into sharp relief their dark findings, which include subtext from directors Cui Rui and Liu Xiang on China’s wealth disparity.

The twists and turns come so fast and are so wild, the husband will be left questioning his own sanity.

Hot take: Suspend disbelief and surrender to the dizzying puzzle. It is a thrill ride.

They Cloned Tyrone (M18)

122 minutes, available on Netflix

4 stars

The story: How could drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) be gunned down by a rival in a carpark, then wake up the following morning with no bullet holes nor any memory of his murder?

They Cloned Tyrone is a satire on America’s race relations that is at once laugh-out-loud madcap and trenchantly political.

The Netflix sci-fi comedy pays homage to the profane blaxploitation pictures that were cranked out in the 1970s predominantly by and for black Americans.

Superfly pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), his whip-smart sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) and Boyega’s doleful Fontaine make up the trio of unlikely heroes – though are there four of them, or even multiples?

Creed II (2018) screenwriter Juel Taylor, directing his debut feature based on his original script, tellingly inserts “cloned” in the film’s title.

The bickering associates turn amateur sleuths – Yo-Yo is a fan of fictional teen detective Nancy Drew – to poke around for answers behind Fontaine’s undead mystery.

They discover a subterranean laboratory right below their ghetto, where the government is conducting heinous eugenics experiments on their poor black community. Their identities and culture are being white-washed for assimilation.

The actors are a blast, fighting back against The Man to regain their autonomy in shoot-outs and other hijinks involving fried chicken and hair gel.

The retro production design and vintage R&B soundtrack – featuring the likes of singers Diana Ross, Patrice Rushen and Michael Jackson – are set alongside contemporary references to cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

The timeline is deliberately vague because whether today or in the past, structural racism is endemic.

Hot take: First-time film-maker Taylor’s conspiracy caper is an imaginative piece of storytelling – no clone here – that surprises right until the closing punchline.