Weekend in Taipei

Luc Besson shot part of 'Lucy' in Taipei and liked the city enough to go back a decade later, this time as producer and co-writer. 'Weekend in Taipei' is a French-Taiwanese action film in English directed by George Huang, thirty years after his debut with 'Swimming with Sharks', and it was the film that put EuropaCorp back into production after four years on hold.

John Lawlor is a DEA agent who's spent months undercover in a Minneapolis restaurant trying to get to Kwang, a seafood tycoon whose real trade is drugs. His cover is blown in a fight among the stoves and knives, and his boss, tired of the damage, puts him on mandatory leave. Lawlor has other plans for the weekend: somebody has written from Taipei claiming to hold Kwang's ledger, so he gets on a plane off his own bat.

What he doesn't expect is to run into Joey. They met in the same city fifteen years earlier, when he was working undercover and she was the best driver for hire in town, and it ended badly. These days Joey is married to Kwang, lives in a gilded cage and has a teenage son, Raymond, who can't stand his stepfather because of what his fishing fleet does to dolphins. The three of them end up on the run across half the island with the tycoon's men behind them, and with plenty to settle among themselves.

Luke Evans is Lawlor and Sung Kang the villain, two veterans of the 'Fast & Furious' films who had already shared 'Fast & Furious 6'. Joey is played by Gwei Lun-mei, the Taiwanese star of 'Black Coal Thin Ice' and 'The Wild Goose Lake', and Wyatt Yang is Raymond. It was shot in the summer of 2023, starting on 3 July, in places like Ximending, Zhongshan Hall and Taipei City Hall.

After a premiere in Taipei on 1 September 2024, it opened in French and Taiwanese cinemas on the 25th. The US release followed on 8 November through Ketchup Entertainment, where it opened in 17th place with $380,057 from 1,021 cinemas. Critics were divided: hardly anyone argues with the chases and the fights, and nearly everyone agrees the script is little more than the thread that holds them together.

• Action
• Adventure
• Thriller