World Tibet Network News Monday, June 8th, 1998

(Irish Times; 06/05/98)

Richard Gere has been persona non grata in China for several years now because of his condemnation of that country's policy in **Tibet**, so it's unlikely to worry him too much that his new thriller is likely to earn him a permanent position at the top of the Beijing government's Most Hated Movie Stars list (these things matter - just ask Disney). Directed with typical smoothness by Jon Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Up Close And Personal), Red Corner aims to do for the Chinese legal system what Gorky Park did for the preglasnost Moscow police, and the portrait it paints is not a pretty one. Gere plays a high- flying television executive, in Beijing to negotiate a lucrative satellite channel contract with high-ranking Party officials. Celebrating the deal in a fashionable nightclub, he meets a beautiful young model with whom he spends the night, waking the next morning to find her murdered. Flung into jail, Gere is faced with the unfamiliar and none-too-gentle strictures of the Chinese legal system, an

d assigned a public defender (Bai Ling) who herself seems convinced of his guilt. Despite this, Gere manages to slowly persuade her that he is innocent, and the two begin to unravel the threads of a conspiracy involving corruption at the highest levels of government.

Despite some moments of pure corniness (a laughable rooftop chase across the city towards the US embassy), and the kind of ending that gives melodrama a bad name, this is a very assured, well-crafted legal thriller, which tries harder than most American films not to be condescending about the society it depicts. Bai Ling's fine performance as the young idealist who believes in the justice of the system is crucial to the film's carefully constructed criticisms of corruption and nepotism in modern China. The American embassy officials are depicted as being just as venal as their Chinese counterparts, and the use of satellite TV as the plot McGuffin (shades of Rupert Murdoch) echoes the soft- liberal condemnation of Western media values which Avnet voiced in Up Close And Personal. Red Corner is no masterpiece, and it's certainly too long, but it has its pleasures along the way.