Godspeed (Mong-Hong Chung, 2017) | Taiwan

by Finso Gyaltsen, viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (Feb. 2017)

Godspeed is a humorous satirical road movie about the journey of a a drug mule and a cab driver as they drive across modern day Taiwan. One of the bigger attractions of this drug caper comedy is Michael Hui who plays the role of the taxi driver in an extraordinary way where you question the idea of his own character. In Godspeed,we have an entertaining chemistry between Hui and Dow. Na Dow is a drug mule who travels across Taiwan delivering top-shelf heroin for the triads.

Na Dow finds the job by simply answering an newspaper ad, and his way in which he transports the illegal goods is equally unvarying: he hails a cab in the morning, rides it from the north of Taiwan to the south, delivers a package, and returns back to Taipei in the same cab that very night. The cab driver is middle-aged Hong Kong native who came to Taiwan about 25 years ago, Old Xu (Michael Hui) goes out of his way to be hired, to the point where you question if he has an ulterior motive of some sort and, even though he says that he’s been driving all night, agrees to take Na Dow down south in hopes of making some extra moolah and getting a bit closer to retirement. Chung’s film has its funny moments but is not that consistent when you think of it as a “comedy”. The rugged mix of violence and the slow processing of  humour both creates a unusual comedy.

Overall, Godspeed is a movie that will leave you entertained while also questioning the happenings of this weird but attractive story. In one scene Na Dow and Hui try to crash a funeral in hopes of  scoring some free chow, but when they enter the premises it turns out to be a systematic money trap where donations are “recommended” leaving them broker than they were to escape this unusual predicament.  It was scenes like those which really drew me in to look for something that might not have been there making it all the more amusing. 4/5