Shanghai Triad

            Shanghai Triad is about a boy, Shuishang, whose family works for a mobster boss. The boy’s uncle gets him a job as the servant for the boss’s mistress. The movie follows his first seven days working for the mob boss who is one of the most well known drug lords in Shanghai. The mistress treats him like the boy is stupid and yells at him a lot. She frequently refers to him as a “country bumpkin”. He gets insulted one night and spits in her drink. One night while he is asleep in his room, a bunch of people from a rival gang come in and attack the people in the house. The boss gets injured and Shuishang’s uncle is murdered, but Shuishang and the mistress are unscathed. The boss, the mistress, Shuishang, and some of the boss’s surviving men retreat to a far off island. The boss’s injuries are treated while everyone else sits around the island. Shuishang befriends the only people living on the island, a woman and her young daughter. The mistress even becomes fascinated with their simple life. The boss later reveals that he knows that his right-hand man has betrayed him in order to become the new boss and kills him. He also kills the mistress for having an affair and betraying him too. He sails off with Shuishang hanging upside down in his boat and the little girl too so that she may become his next mistress when she is older.

            The themes in this movie are betrayal and revenge. The boss’s right-hand man betrays him in order to become the new drug lord. Him and the mistress also betray the boss by having an affair with each other and he betrays her by telling her he was just using her. In the end, the boss betrays the mistress by not granting her last wish that he told her to make. The boss in the end sought his revenge on all those who betrayed him. Meanwhile, Shuishang’s uncle dies and he wishes to seek revenge on the men who did it and the boss encourages him to do so.

            This movie was alright. The character of Shuishang was awkward and a bit off-putting. He does not act very intelligent either. It seems like some of the simplest instructions he struggles with. The storyline with the affair, the gang war, and the betrayal was intriguing. I was not a fan of the ending, however, with the boy hanging upside down and the mistress getting killed. It is just not how I pictured the ending to be. All in all, it was not my kind of movie, but it was pretty well done.