I haven't read The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino. But I understand that it's generally considered as being a classic of the mystery genre. I don't know how closely Alec Su's film of the same name follows the novel's storyline, but I suspect it is quite faithful.
This is a film worth seeing. Superficially, it's a kind of a Chinese Conan Doyle tale with physics professor Tang Chuan representing Holmes and police cop Luo Miao, his Watsonian off - sider. And as a police procedural it's not too bad. But the film is deeper than that, delving philosophically into the nature and realities of friendship, loneliness, intellectualism, obsessiveness and what actually does constitute criminal behaviour.
All good and for a film of this type, as best as I could see, it does try to minimise those annoying contrivances that invariably pop up to save on exposition, or exist purely because of lazy script writing.
But two things for me kind of jarringly stand out, to prevent Devotion from attaining a more highly regarded status.
The "murder" upon which the whole storyline hinges, is clearly not a murder. At best, it's a plain old killing in self - defence and at worst a low - grade manslaughter. The advice to the killer should have been, "Don't touch anything and call the police." Yes, it would have probably resulted in a far shorter film. But I suggest even a rookie defence lawyer would have been licking his/her lips to take on this case.
The other thing that just didn't ring true at all, was Tang's force field ray gun type invention, which of course has a part to play late in proceedings. The question has to be posed, as to why you'd want to bring elements of science - fiction into what is nominally presented as a fairly low - key, police procedural with an underlying mystery, to be fully revealed, rather than solved (The audience find out pretty early on who killed who.). I really wonder whether this episode was in the source novel. Somehow I doubt it.
The Devotion of Suspect X is a solid and sometimes affecting detective story that also provides an entertaining challenge for the mind, but lets itself down somewhat, through a couple of fundamental script choices.
This is a film worth seeing. Superficially, it's a kind of a Chinese Conan Doyle tale with physics professor Tang Chuan representing Holmes and police cop Luo Miao, his Watsonian off - sider. And as a police procedural it's not too bad. But the film is deeper than that, delving philosophically into the nature and realities of friendship, loneliness, intellectualism, obsessiveness and what actually does constitute criminal behaviour.
All good and for a film of this type, as best as I could see, it does try to minimise those annoying contrivances that invariably pop up to save on exposition, or exist purely because of lazy script writing.
But two things for me kind of jarringly stand out, to prevent Devotion from attaining a more highly regarded status.
The "murder" upon which the whole storyline hinges, is clearly not a murder. At best, it's a plain old killing in self - defence and at worst a low - grade manslaughter. The advice to the killer should have been, "Don't touch anything and call the police." Yes, it would have probably resulted in a far shorter film. But I suggest even a rookie defence lawyer would have been licking his/her lips to take on this case.
The other thing that just didn't ring true at all, was Tang's force field ray gun type invention, which of course has a part to play late in proceedings. The question has to be posed, as to why you'd want to bring elements of science - fiction into what is nominally presented as a fairly low - key, police procedural with an underlying mystery, to be fully revealed, rather than solved (The audience find out pretty early on who killed who.). I really wonder whether this episode was in the source novel. Somehow I doubt it.
The Devotion of Suspect X is a solid and sometimes affecting detective story that also provides an entertaining challenge for the mind, but lets itself down somewhat, through a couple of fundamental script choices.