I love a film with a good twist and Weekend in Taipei has one of the best in recent memory. It’s a new movie from Ketchup Entertainment, a smaller production company. It has the feel of a bigger-budget action film from Lionsgate or one of the other major studios. That is when you know you made something good when you have something that feels bigger than it is. It was a surprise for me I’ll admit, but it’s good to be surprised once in a while.

John Lawler (Luke Evans) is a DEA Agent working undercover as a pastry chef at a prestigious restaurant when all hell breaks loose. He gets told to take some time off, but instead doubles down on his work and goes to Taipei to investigate a drug dealer, Kwang (Sung Kang)  he’s been after for a while. When a woman Joey (Gwei Lun-mei) and her son Raymond (Wyatt Yang) get wrapped up in the investigation things start to get confusing for this tough man.

Luke Evans has fallen off a bit since his days of the Fast & The Furious Sage and doing Disney films. He’s been doing a bunch of low-budget action movies that have small releases or go directly to VOD. This time out he has a decent story to work with and good actors to work opposite of. Another Fast & The Furious Alumni Sung Kang plays the villain. He’s hamming it up in this role; it’s nothing like his character in that billion-dollar franchise. Evans is seemingly enjoying this by-the-number actioner, but it is better than he or the filmmakers deserved it to be.

There are a few action scenes in this movie and they are pretty clever. There is a chase scene where Evans is running after a car. He uses every shortcut he can find to keep up with the car he’s chasing. You don’t see car chases like this in films, so that was pretty crazy. Also, another scene I rather enjoyed was a fight scene at a movie theater with the famous Japanese action film The House of Flying Daggers playing in the background.  That was some pretty clever storytelling on the writers, Luc Besson and George Huang’s part. These were my two favorite action scenes in the film.

The key element in the story is the relationship between Evans, Lun-mei, and Yang’s characters. Without spoiling the movie that has a connection to each other, they are also tied to the plot in a key way. A ledger is used as a mcguffin and that drives the plot most of the time. The twist is the other driving force of the story. Both of these work well within the context of the story. Most audiences will like where these go in the overall story. I didn’t mind them either because they both served a purpose that worked very well.

Weekend In Taipei is your typical action film with fine acting by a cast of relatively well-known actors. The story would be generic except for the macguffin and the twist. Those two plot points make this an entertaining movie to watch. The triangle connection is fascinating between the main players in the cast and that is why this film is worth seeing. Two action set pieces are also pretty entertaining to watch. This would mostly be a throwaway movie, but it’s pretty fun and lighthearted. It is what audiences need right now.

3 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen