By Zhao Kun

Zhang Yimou's latest, A Simple Noodle Story, is… surprise! A comedy. Are you laughing yet? Based on the Cohen brothers' Blood Simple made 20 years ago, Zhang has transported the original's story from a bar in Texas to an isolated noodle restaurant in western China.

A restaurant owner discovers his wife cheating on him and hires a corrupt cop to kill her and her lover. The killer cop, however, formulates his own scheme, and decides instead to rob the restaurant owner of all his worldly possessions.

Arguably China's most infl uential fi lm director, Zhang is known for always trying something new in his fi lms. His sob story Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles drew plenty of tears, the martial arts epic Hero was said to have done wonders for Chinese cinema around the world, so when I heard the prolifi c director's latest was a mainstream comedy, I decided to give him the benefi t of all my doubts.

So imagine my disappointment when it became blindingly apparent that in making N o o d l e s , Zhang's only intention had been to make a quick buck. Simply put, A Simple Noodle Story is nothing more than a hodgepodge of contrived jokes strung together in an unlaughably bad way. Audiences already have plenty of bad comedy available for free on TV, so why should anyone pay to see Zhang's abortion of a movie in a theater?

For a director who's spent the past 20 years building up a reputation, you'd think maintaining a semblance of artistic integrity would be higher on his list of priorities On a scale of one to ten, A Simple Noodle Story gets an uncooked and wet 3.5.

Zhao Kun is a writer for China Drive on CRI EZFM (FM91.5 in Beijing). He can be reached at zhaokun123@gmail.com. China Drive is a bilingual news and lifestyle show on the air every weekday from 11 am to noon, and 5 to 7 pm.