Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #144 Vanishing Son III (1994)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 has forced me to see a whole lot of obscure, random and ferociously unimportant movies I otherwise would probably have never even thought about, let alone devoted my time and energy to writing about for posterity.
That is particularly true of the Gayheart and Kitaen side-missions. There’s a roughly zero percent chance that in a world in which I did not have a column where readers could pay me money to write about various pop culture ephemera I would choose to watch the 1994 TV movie Vanishing Son and write about it, let alone watch it, write about it and its follow-ups Vanishing Son III and Vanishing Son IV but not Vanishing Son 2 because Gayheart is not in that one.
I did not watch Vanishing Son II because there are limits to even my masochism but Vanishing Son III is considerate enough to update me on the proceedings with an opening that devotes nearly five minutes to a sort of “Previously, on Vanishing Son” rundown of the events of the first two films.
In a voice positively booming with cheese a narrator forcefully declaims, “Trapped! In the explosive turmoil of Red China, two brothers share a dream. As a stranger in a strange land, Jian-Wa (Russell Wong) finds the love of his life (Rebecca Gayheart as golden tressed cellist Clair Armstrong), faces the death of his father, and fights to keep his brother (Chi Muoi Lo as Wago) from a life of crime and violence. So Jian-Wa must move on, and leave his brother behind. Finding a home among a community of simple fishermen, Jian-Wa learns that hatred and prejudice still follow him” before announcing, “And NOW Vanishing Son III.”
Generous clips from the first two entries in the series accompany this bombastic opening burst of verbiage, including one where Dean Stockwell, as a Ku Klux Klan leader at war with Jian-Wa and his band of simple fisherman, tells the floppy haired kid from The Heights and Beverly Hills, 90210, “Hell, I’ve ALWAYS been Klan!”
This made me happy, because it essentially gives the wonderful character actor a cameo in a movie he’s not actually in, but it also ensured that absolutely nothing in Vanishing Son III could possibly live up to that magical moment or the lurid insanity of pitting our sexy and dynamic hero, who uses his skillful hands to both make beautiful music with his violin and beat the holy living shit out of anyone who stands in his way, squaring off against the Ku Klux Klan.
Vanishing Son III begins with Jian-Wa, having apparently thoroughly kicked the Ku Klux Klan’s ass the last time around, performing the violin for a rapt crowd that includes Clair, who is overwhelmed with emotion after her soulmate mysteriously disappeared one step ahead of murderous gangs in the first film.
It’s not long until the star-crossed lovers are doing what they do best, which is make sweet, sweet love and while Gayheart and Wong are extraordinarily beautiful human beings I would be happy to watch in the act of love-making this is a television movie, so the surprisingly copious sex scenes are the familiar blur of shadows and shapes vaguely suggesting the contours of the human body.
Clair is supposed to be obsessed with this beautiful, talented, mysterious and fundamentally unknowable figure, this impossibly gorgeous man-God but Gayheart lacks the fiery intensity needed to pull off the role. The wildly charismatic Wong smolders sexily but Gayheart just seems kind of dazed when she’s called upon to express intense emotion and white-hot sexual longing.
Wong has infinitely better chemistry and a far more complex and satisfying relationship with Chi Muoi Lo as his brother, a strong-willed martial arts dynamo who chose a life of criminality and lawlessness while his straight-arrow sibling attempts to follow a straight and narrow path.
Over the course of the Vanishing Son saga, Wago has worked his way up the organized crime ladder, from enforcer and assassin to boss. Racist cops want to bring down Chinese gangs so they tell Jian-Wa that unless he goes undercover for them as an informant inside his brother’s gang they’ll deport him and make sure he ends getting tortured alongside other dissidents.
So Jian-Wa reluctantly goes undercover rather than get shipped back to his homeland to be tortured and killed. Jian-Wa and Wago have a fascinating dynamic. There’s just so much going on in their every exchange, a complicated, combustible combination of love and hate, loyalty and bitter resentment, friendship and betrayal.
It’s a joy to watch these evenly matched fighters square off against each other. There is a particularly virtuoso sequence where Lo, who suggests a cross, physically and personality-wise, between Sammo Hung and Joe Pesci in his Scorsese movies, strikes out in anger and rage towards his elegant older brother, who deftly evades his brother’s attacks without ever dropping the umbrella he is holding.
Wago works for a shadowy underworld figure known only as “The General” (Academy-Award winner Haing S. Ngor), who takes a liking to Wago’s girlfriend Lili (Vivian Wu). In China Lili was a freedom fighter but when she was captured by the government she turned informer and ratted out her colleagues. Then, to get out of China with her life and limbs intact the deeply scarred survivor turned to the Chinese mob, which forced her into prostitution.
It’s an incredibly grim development for a martial arts melodrama: in order to avoid suffering a fate worse than death at the hands of either the Chinese government or the Triad Lili has to see and do things no human being should ever have to do or see.
Lili is a heavy who thinks nothing of ordering a hit on Clair out of romantic jealousy but Wu makes her an unexpectedly nuanced and ambivalent character, a victim as well as a villain.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Vanishing Son III as an unabashedly, unashamedly sordid melodrama about survivors defined by trauma who try to find new lives and new beginnings but cannot escape the ghosts and complications of the past.
Vanishing Son III ends by killing its two most fascinating characters in one fell swoop when Lili and Wago end up shot to death following a big shoot out gone awry.
Given how central Wong and Lo’s chemistry is to the franchise’s success it might seem like a bad movie to kill off Wago but in a wonderfully cheesy development, when Vanishing Son was turned into a thirteen episode hour-long series that found Jian-Wa traveling the country and having adventures he was assisted by, you guessed it, his beloved dead brother’s ghost.
His ghost! Lo made it onto the series as a freaking spirit from beyond the grave!
That’s ALMOST enough to get me to want to at least check out the series version of Vanishing Son but God knows I have plenty more Gayheart movies to watch and write about, so like Jian-Wa I will continue to nobly roam the world in search of adventure and meaning and, of course, more of that sweet, sweet Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 money.
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