Let’s just say that Zhang Yimou’s remake of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) doesn’t exactly strike the tone I would have selected for the topic matter, and film, in question. Re-imagining Blood Simple in Eastern terms, A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop takes place in a barren, to put it kindly, desert town in China, not far from the Great Wall, where the miserly, crabby old scrooge Wang (Ni Dahong) owns a noodle shop—if the old adage about business success being all about location is true, then how Wang became exceedingly wealthy eludes me—and lives with his far younger wife, played by Yan Ni (and oddly nameless).When he discovers that his unhappy-and-feisty wife is having an affair with his employee, the weak-willed—except when he’s tossing dough; you’ll see—Li (Xiao Shenyang), Wang hires the stone-faced policeman Zhang (Sun Hunglei) to murder the pair. But the plot thickens when Zhang’s greed gets the best of him, and mass killing, double-crossings, and multiple revenges of different levels ensue.

Like in Hero (2003) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), Yimou fills the screen with rich colors and vibrant images, like sweeping sand dunes and fiery sunsets. The problem is that what makes Blood Simple (which, in fairness, I haven’t seen in full in some time) so gripping is the smoky, nightmarish atmosphere that the Coens created. Here, Yimou’s overdone compositions lend a cartoonish quality to the proceedings that sap it of most of its punch. The first 30 minutes are particularly awful, as A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop‘s attempts to mix mystery with farce fall flat on its face. Blood Simple is full of tension, dry wit, and great acting…but Dahong isn’t Dan Hedaya, and in fact, only the graceful Hunglei turns in a truly strong performance here, with Shenyang eking out a passing grade. The remainder of the cast ranges from lame to irritating to flat-out bad. Obviously, this cinematic form was a conscious choice by the filmmaker, but I can’t help but feel that a Japanese director like Miike or Kitano could have done something much more interesting with the story (those who liked Chen Kaige’s The Promise, which I found unbearable, might really enjoy this one).

In its defense, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop gets a good bit more palatable after the aforementioned woeful beginning: once the first murder occurs, multiple long, extended wordless sequences frequently replace much of the unwelcome glitz, and the film settles into a moderately enjoyable flow, though it never comes close to living up to its potential, even though many scenes are taken almost exactly from the source material (though as we’ve seen in Gus Van Sant’s dreadful remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, that’s anything but an automatic recipe for success). It feels to me like Yimou has lost much of his knack for nuance over the past 15 years—among his filmography, only Raise the Red Lantern (1991) contains much subtlety, and doesn’t use overcharged visuals to get much of its point across. He’s talented enough to keep most of his work from careening completely off the tracks—I’ve enjoyed most on some level or another—but this is the closest he’s come to a true failure. The final hour is adequate enough to prevent A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop from claiming that unfortunate title, but it’s not enough to salvage the movie into something I’d recommend to anyone but the most fervent fans of Yimou or the genre.

41/100