Detective Chinatown 1900: high spectacle Chinese blockbuster turns back time for a muddled prequel

For 2025, Chinese Lunar New Year celebrates the Year of the Snake, where one should expect the manifestation of mystery and renewal. With that in mind, China’s box-office darling, the Detective Chinatown franchise, returned to screens with a fourth instalment – a new story that moves away from the metropolitan ventures of detectives Qin Feng and Tang Ren seen in its previous films. Directors Chen Sicheng and Dai Mo have turned back the clock for a bombastic prequel.

In San Francisco’s 20th century Chinatown, characters Qin and Tang are swapped for Sherlock-Holmes-buff Qin Fu (Turbo Liu) and a character known by two names, Ghost and Ah Gui (Wang Baoqiang), who we strangely understand to be Native American but is of Chinese descent. Multiple stories blend together as the duo conspire to solve an abundance of murders in the area. The murder of Congressman Grant’s (John Cusack) daughter Alice shakes the town and racial tensions between the Chinese and Irish diaspora bubble to the surface when the killer is suspected to be Chinese. Grant uses his daughter’s murder to spread xenophobic rhetoric and pushes for the removal of Chinese people in the town. Notably less screen time is given to the adjacent murder on the same night of a Native American elder.

Staying true to the upbeat Detective Chinatown style, the film is filled with high production slapstick. In one funny scene where the protagonists first meet, Ghost/Ah Gui introspectively waits for a ‘sign‘ before Qin Fu lands on him after falling out of a window. The film charmingly plays on the meet-cute sensibility with romantic music and slow-mo editing. Purposefully clumsy fight scenes with sped-up sequences and witty pronunciation-based gags are enjoyable enough to watch. But with its hefty 2 hour and 20 minute runtime, the heavy-handed use of these techniques, combined with a confusing mix of storylines, can feel tiresome. Amid all this showiness, an attempt to set up the film’s ambitious ‘eureka!’ mystery reveal just feels too predictable.

For a film about the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, the tone is also surprisingly regressive when it comes to other ethnicities. Detective Chinatown 1900 repeatedly others its Native American characters. Instances where Ghost/Ah Gui must use his ‘pig nose’ (as it’s translated in the English subtitles) to sniff out clues use uncomfortable primitive stereotypes for cheap laughs. In the end, the film puts spectacle before its own politics. 

► Detective Chinatown 1900 is in UK cinemas now.