‘Shanghai' awkward, clunky and charming

Japanese-controlled Shanghai in the months before Pearl Harbor is an ideal locale for a tale of intrigue, which is why so many movies have been set there.

“Shanghai” is hardly the best of them, but it has some charms.

Director Mikael Hafstrom and a fine cast and crew have made a film that’s elegant and gauche in roughly equal measure.

Much of the awkwardness descends on star John Cusack, who recites the clunky narration.

He plays Paul Soames, an American spy posing as a journalist.

Paul arrives in Shanghai from Berlin - he was a pro-Nazi correspondent for the Washington Post - just in time for the murder of a friend and colleague.

Paul undertakes to solve the crime and, while he’s at it, prevent Japan’s assault on Hawaii.

This involves seducing the wife (Franka Potente) of a German engineer, falling in love with a Chinese woman (Gong Li) who directs the resistance to the Japanese and ?locating a Japanese opium addict (Rinko Kikuchi) linked to his dead pal.

To complicate things, the resistance leader is married to a local gang boss (Chow Yun-Fat) and the junkie is the runaway lover of Shanghai’s Japanese spy boss (Ken Watanabe).

The film debuted in China five years ago, and its convoluted plot is one reason it’s so late getting a U.S. release.

But the preposterous story isn’t really the point.

“Shanghai” is an exercise in retro glamour, alluring decadence and tough-guy posing, all of which it delivers in sufficient quantities.