Jim Goddard
Shanghai Surprise

Madonna's acting career represents a painful and unhealable wound within her (highly) enviable saga as a global superstar: with the exception of a few sporadic successes (Evita, Dick Tracy, Desperately Seeking Susan), no film in which she starred or was a member of the main cast has had significant critical acclaim or ticket sales at the box office. In short, the tons of records sold in recent decades can be easily contrasted with a bleak, pale film activity, which currently sees her as a director of some works with a historical-sentimental background.

The work under analysis, "Shanghai Surprise", more than any other suffered from this "failure" to triumph on film: released way back in 1986, right in the middle of the True Blue boom and in the midst of her unhappy marital idyll with Sean Penn, the film attempts to combine comedy, adventure, and drama and especially introduces Madonna's quintessential alter ego, the seemingly good-natured, virginal, and shy femme-fatale who, at the first opportunity, reveals with cunning and a pinch of malice her true self, the mighty manipulator on duty, an incredibly intelligent mistress of passions and emotions. This cinematic persona will be reprised, albeit with little change to the original script, in subsequent films like Who's That Girl, Dick Tracy up to the shocking Body of Evidence where our protagonist will abandon any comedic-whimsical-similar good-natured side to immerse herself completely in the most malignant and irrational unscrupulousness.

The plot of "Shanghai Surprise" "adapts" easily to the strict rules of the blockbuster model, introducing the characters of Gloria Tatlock (Madonna) and Glendon Wasey (Sean Penn), respectively a missionary and an adventurer stationed at China's largest port in the year of grace 1937. The focus of their "mission" initially involves finding a large shipment of opium intended for wounded soldiers, then involving a much more noteworthy and enticing stash of jewels and precious stones cleverly hidden under the flowers of the "forbidden" plant. Roaming among the docks of the port city and the abode of a self-styled and sensual sorceress/fortuneteller, the couple will manage to get hold of the loot using a somewhat bizarre weapon aptly named Shanghai Surprise (a sort of explosive box), fleeing towards the unknown and towards the love that naturally must triumph in every self-respecting blockbuster.

Halfway between comedy and "Indiana Jones style" adventure, the film presents fairly interesting cues and unfortunately several weaknesses: while it's true that the comic-action hybrid can be strategic and working, the same can't be said for the plot, a mix of feelings and stories not thoroughly developed and completed, lost amidst fleeting and minor adrenaline spikes and somewhat simplistic dialogues. Thus, we are faced with an immature and unresolved work that, despite the apparent honesty in attempting to stimulate laughs and action from the viewer, fails to adequately fulfill this aim. Even the performances of the protagonists appear imprecise and doubtful: Penn's respective transformations from a stubborn and brave adventurer to a timid pseudo-hero and Madonna's from an immaculate girl to a fatal lady similar to her musical counterpart prove to be significant cues unfortunately not exploited properly and dismissed far too trivially and blandly.

In short, we are not facing an authentic masterpiece of international cinema nor a famous and virtuous commercial film; however, it is possible, at least once, to close one's eyes to this and attempt to watch this work without too many inflating preconceptions, an imperfect and incomplete work, yet quite honest in its intentions and basic claims.