Mountain Patrol

A modern-day tale of pursuit set among tribesmen in the wintry mountains of Tibet—based on actual events from the 1990s—Lu Chuan's Mountain Patrol is a fascinating oddity, marked by amazing locale footage and a narrative that cannily subverts audience expectations. The film opens with a sequence of antelope being slaughtered by poachers, who also capture and kill one of the local volunteers charged with protecting the herds. The murder brings a journalist from Beijing to the scene, who accompanies the stern leader of the volunteers as he raises a posse to track down the poachers and bring them to justice. The pursuit eventually leads to the capture of a band of skinners hired by the criminals, but a lack of supplies and gasoline forces the company to free them and split up, with some returning to town for necessities while a few continue the chase, facing unforgiving weather and the dangers posed by both the landscape and the bad guys. On the surface this is a simple story—distinguished by the setting, which features some awesome vistas (it's no surprise that the National Geographic Society was involved in the production)—boasting a welcome complexity in its characters, especially the leader of the volunteers, who's not only obsessive but also tortured by his own failings. Mountain Patrol isn't simply a tale of heroes and villains, but—like John Ford's The Searchers—something more subtle and compelling, unsparing in its depiction of brutality yet strangely beautiful, too. Recommended.  (F. Swietek)