Courtesy of iQIYI Inc.
The New York Asian Film Festival 2024 presents the North American Premiere of Wolf Hiding (Nu chao), a crime-thriller shot in Malaysia. Director Marc Ma has packed an action movie with social commentary and the right dose of drama. The screenplay written by Hui Chen, Yu Gong, and Haoran Gu centers on a vigilante attacking the most powerful crime family in a South Asian Country while the patriarch has just decided to retire. No one knows who hired the killer, and the suspect starts spreading among those who want to become the new leader. The internal fighting among the family members will help Chen An (Nick Cheung) to unravel his rage against all those who gained their richness and power through child trafficking.
It takes a little bit to Wolf Hiding to reach that level of intensity necessary for entertaining the audience in the proper way, but once the thriller gets to that point, it becomes an entertaining mix of elaborate action scenes and moving drama. When a movie like this ends better than it started it always means the story is developed in the right way and the characters are capable of reaching the viewer’s empathy. Marc Ma often uses flashbacks first in order to explain the drama that the main characters went through, then to build some plot twists that are quite unexpected therefore surprising, entertaining. Sequence after sequence, Wolf Hiding builds up a quite powerful show especially when the action and the violence explode: the sequence of the battle in the hospital is for example a stunning moment of genre cinema, bloody and wonderfully edited.
Courtesy of iQIYI Inc.
There are two reasons if Wolf Hiding isn’t in the end completely satisfying. First issue is the rhetoric that in more than one scene appears, especially when the child slavery issue is addressed. This way the movie slips into the melodrama’s trap, something that is probably suitable for a border audience, but it doesn’t really help the strength of the social message that is contained behind the entertainment. The very final sequence is a perfect example of this.
Second issue is that for the most part of the story the intrigues related to the war for power within the crime organization are more thrilling than the plot regarding the main character. The thirst for blood and revenge that Chen An shows could have been portrayed in a stronger way, and this happens most likely because Nick Cheung doesn’t show the same charisma and stage presence of his “enemies” Talu Wang, Danny Kwon-Kwan Chan and Marc Ma himself, who plays a gangster in his movie.
There is a lot going on inside the plot of Wolf Hiding, probably a little too much for the movie to be completely cohesive. That said, in the end Marc Ma crime-drama has a lot of entertaining sequences, a screenplay that endorses a sufficient narrative and rhythm, a few compelling characters and above all a couple of good plot twists that make the whole project way better. Mixing melodrama and action doesn’t work all the time, especially when the “message” overcomes story and characters, but in the end this is not a flaw that sinks the entire project. If Wolf Hiding would have lasted ten, fifteen minutes less and would have left some backstories to the audience’s imagination, it would have probably been a sharper and more incisive movie. But even like this it’s definitely a fulfilling cinematic experience.
Grade: C+
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This is the trailer for Wolf Hiding