'Cliff Walkers': Zhang Yimou's Riff On James Bond Is Perhaps His Most Restrained Film Yet [Review]

With its spies, secrets, and super-secret code names, Zhang Yimou’s “Cliff Walkers” is seemingly the Chinese director’s version of James Bond. But that’s where the comparisons end. While the Bond films are sexy, suave, and aimed-at-your-heart, Yimou’s film is cold, distant, and aimed-at-your-soul, trading thrills for a mystifying moodiness.

The film is based on a script by Quan Yongxian, who spent three years researching spycraft. In the story of “Cliff Walkers,” two couples parachute into the state of Manchukuo during the 1930s, landing in a forest just outside of Habrin. The four communist agents, led by Zhang (Zhang Yi, of “Mountains May Depart”) are on a top-secret mission to smuggle an escapee from a Japanese prison camp to safety. When a shootout in the woods goes south, Zhang pairs up with the youthful Lan (Liu Haocun) while Yu (Qin Hailu) and Chuliang (Zhu Yawen) meet up with another group of agents—spies who might as well be wearing name tags that say “bad guys” on them.

Zhang quickly makes them out to be informants–she sees right under their fur coats and brimmed hats. And she proves her skill with a pistol, destroying them skillfully and brutally. Turns out there are other informants, so she jumps from one snowy set-piece to the next, deciphering codes and unmasking traitors, turncoats, and terribly disguised moles. Meanwhile, Yu hides in back alleys. Chuliang ducks through shadows. An agent named Zhou (Yu Hewei) infiltrates the prison under the guise of an officer. Skillfully, all these characters move around like pawns on a chessboard, each playing a pivotal part in their master’s endgame, and the director’s middlegame, as Yimou keeps us guessing as to who is double-crossing who, who has the upper hand, and why the action is so restrained?

Of all the director’s historical epics (“Hero,” “Red Sorghum”), “Cliff Walkers” may be the sparest and most realistic—not counting the window-bashing and eye-ball gouging. It’s taut and underplayed; there’s very little flash in the form of fights or gadgets or car chases. There are no martial arts. It’s pure espionage wrapped around a tale of covert ops, double-crosses, and the spies who put their lives on the line, on both sides.

The film is less about action and spectacle, and more about sacrifice and the cold fate of being a spy, so Yimou surrounds his characters with a ghostly atmosphere. He turns Habrin into a snow globe, and there isn’t a shot where snow isn’t falling. No need for a weatherman here: Every day is snowy, cloudy, below zero, with a chance of Snapchat-worthy sunsets.

“Cliff Walkers” quickly drops us into this winter wonderland, all whites, grays, and blacks, and delivers some of the most mesmerizing landscapes you’ll see all year. But for a film about undercover operatives, it lacks thrills, and it doesn’t give us any characters we can latch onto. Nevertheless, Yimou goes out in style. He may not be making a Bond movie, but he definitely earns his license to kill. [B-]

“Cliff Walkers” is available now.