Mainland cop Ma Shen (Jiang Wen) wakes up after a night of heavy drinking at a wedding with a nasty hangover and a missing sidearm. With the guest list for the wedding in hand, Ma Shen begins an investigation to try and find the firearm before it kills an innocent person or he is fired.

This isn't a very exciting setup, and The Missing Gun doesn't display too much, if anything, in the way of tension or action to keep the audience's attention. This very well may have been a case of Chinese governmental censorship -- where the police always have to be portrayed in a positive light -- but, overall, this is just a very bland movie that feels like it is simply going through the motions, rather than trying to create compelling or exciting cinema.

One shouldn't really expect a Mainland cop drama to have the same bravado and kineticism of similar fare from Hong Kong, but it would have been nice if something -- anything -- of interest going on here. Mostly, Ma Shen just mopes around for ninety minutes. He mopes around with his wife and son. He mopes around with his friends. He mopes around with his fellow officers. I was half-expecting the sad sack to stick the barrel of the missing gun into his maw to end his pointless existence, but that would have actually offered a bit of excitement, a trait which is conspicuously absent.

Lu Chuan has shown himself to be a director who is able to work well under the strict rules of the Mainland bureaucracy, such as with his 2009 effort City of Life and Death. But here, Lu seems unsure of himself, his story, and his actors, resulting in a final product that leaves the audience feeling both bored and pandered to at the same time. Even if you're normally a fan of "arthouse" fare, The Missing Gun offers little to the potential viewer, with it ending up being left at the bottom of your Netflix queue.

RATING: 4