Kritiken

Ning Hao's No Man's Land (Wu ren qu), the third and easily the best Far Eastern film in the Cult programme, was also a western of sorts, as well as a Coens-esque caper of collisions deliberate and accidental... a thrilling, often darkly funny genre piece – but it also comes with allegorical undercurrents, as the most extortionate, exploitative aspects of unchecked capitalism come to define the wild borderlands of this "story about animals", which also serves as a cautionary fable for China.

It's a black comedy of escalating payback (involving spitting and pissing), and it exudes sheer masculine nastiness. Completed four years ago, it found release only after extensive reshoots demanded by censors. Yet even in its milder state it remains true to the spirit of Sergio Leone's jaunty grimness, bleached in umber sand and light.

No Man's Land is an hybrid between Mad Max and Once Upon a Time in the West, and the results are ghastly. Without a doubt the weakest film in competition, this so called parody of spaghetti western and post-apocalyptic films just gets absolutely boring in the first 30 minutes of footage (and there are 90 more minutes to endure) with its plot-less story, excess of pyrotechnics, and unrelatable characters.

With an episodic narrative chronicling a protracted desert-valley conflict between a shady lawyer, policemen, peasants, petrol-station proprietors and prairie falcon poachers, the film is slick, relentlessly eventful, bloody and ludicrous, and clearly aimed to appeal primarily to teenage boys. Quite what it was doing in Berlin's competition remains a mystery.

With a nod to the Coen brothers' jet-black humor and twisty plotting, mainland helmer Ning Hao takes his personal brand of Chinese picaresque to nihilistic levels in "No Man's Land"... the film delivers white-knuckle suspense and mean action sequences spiked with an undercurrent of misanthropy and outrage.