Cinema surveillance images are loading at the bottom of the page

Missing gun

Threat advisory: Guarded - General risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Small-town policeman Ma Shan (Jiang Wen) wakes one morning to find his gun missing. In China, where guns are extremely rare, this is serious business: an official who loses his gun can be sent to prison for up to three years. Ma Shan's first thought is that he must have lost the gun at a cousin's wedding he attended the previous evening and he immediately begins to track down people who were around him that night.

Things becomes more disconcerting for Ma Shan when he is surprised to see a former lover who has not been living in the town for many years. When she turns up dead and the bullet appears to be from his gun, things take an even more stressful turn and Ma Shan must do all he can to save face and the love of his family.

Persons of interest

Jiang Wen .... Ma Shan
Ning Jing .... Li Xiaomeng
Wu Yujuan .... Han Xiaoyun
Shi Liang .... Zhou Xiaogang
Lu Chuan .... Screenwriter
Lu Chuan .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Awards and film festivals:

Silk Screen 2002: screening
Sundance Film Festival 2002: World Cinema
Venice Film Festival 2002: Screening
Cinematic Intelligence Agency Trenchcoat Awards 2003

Missing gun QuickTime movie trailers
Studios and distributors:

Sony Pictures Releasing

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

One of the most impenetrable films I have ever experienced.

Firstly, Lu Chuan seems to be putting every camera trick he can think of into his film. A lot of it is hand-held, to demonstrate the protagonist's anxious state of mind. The downside of hand-held shots is that it's very hard on the audience: the human brain automatically compensates for any motion of the head and gets overworked trying to make the same compensation for the jerky motion of a motion picture camera.

Secondly, losing a gun is a big deal in any culture (even the USA) so there isn't much of a Chinese story to follow, which is the purpose of going to see a Chinese film, after all. The crazy characters, and you wonder just how sane anyone is, only go to emphasise the unreality of it all. Why doesn't Ma Shan ask the question he wants answered, "Where is my gun?", especially as he needs everyone's help to find it? Fear of punishment from his superiors is not enough, especially when his closest friends and family are the suspects.

Thirdly, Western literature frowns upon the surprise character in mysteries: all the information required to solve the case must be presented before the characters can work it out. Obviously, Lu Chuan doesn't do this, leaving you with the sense of being ripped off even though it's truer to life than a Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple mystery might be.

Fourthly, there are cultural things going on that are interesting to the amateur anthropologists out there but damned annoying to a more average audience. Why do people sleep in different beds? Surely a bed is a private object, not a public one like the couch or dining table - in China, changing the bed you sleep in seems to be as phenomenal as changing your underpants. There's more stuff like that that just confuses poor me.

So, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10. Your brain will need to be working 10 out of 10 in order to appreciate Missing gun. anything less will leave you disappointed.