A viewer might expect the film’s widescreen, busy images to fill with revenge-action sequences. But in its own way, Mr. Six is much more about a unique man adjusting an out-of-fashion personal code for a new type of crisis in the shadow of his mortality.
Scored to a beautiful, introspection-oriented saxophone score, Mr. Six surprises by attempting to delve behind Feng’s sometime-inscrutable facade, rather than pushing its leading man toward action.
Plotted with limited imagination and directed with atypical flatness, Mr. Six features a strong central performance and shares its humanistic concern with Hu Guan’s previous work but is nevertheless an artistic underachiever.
The baggy 137-minute story drowns out Mr. Feng’s assorted sharp moments with hoary family drama and clumsy plotting, and Li Yifeng is generic as Mr. Six’s son.