Review | Macau in film and on TV, from two James Bond movies to K-drama Boys Over Flowers and Simon Yam’s The Thunder
- Macau was the backdrop for scenes in Bond films The Man With The Golden Gun and Skyfall, and Around the World in 80 Days with Pierce Brosnan and Eric Idle
- Now You See Me 2 starring Jay Chou and former Bond girl Tsai Chin has scenes in The Venetian Macao, as does Korean teen romance drama series Boys Over Flowers
Action, intrigue, sleight of hand, comical blundering, the pocketing of a few (million) patacas … all this and more is yours in the Vegas-on-Sea you see on screens large and small.
How much of it is fantasy, wishful thinking or a version of the truth is for the viewer to decide: after all, the illusory quality of the mirage that is Macau has always been potential television and movie gold.
Modern “gold” is the subject of television series The Thunder (2019; available on iQiyi). Shot partly in Macau, the 48-part saga, starring Hong Kong’s Simon Yam Tat-wah, is a drugs-war thriller pitting frontline police officers against treacherous superiors on the take, as well as the regulation criminals.
A more sedate entry to the former enclave features in the Pierce Brosnan miniseries Around the World in 80 Days (1989), which is most easily summoned on YouTube. The Emmy-nominated adaptation, also starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle, can be found courtesy of “obscurefilms89” – a pure Spinal Tap, where-are-they-now reference if ever there were one.
The series takes some liberties with Jules Verne’s novel, but does show Macau (and Hong Kong) in no little Victorian splendour: colonnaded buildings, junks with battened sails, palanquins and luxuriant offshore islands. All of which, along with the clichéd coolies, godowns, trotting rickshaw runners and inscrutable Chinamen might be considered blithe colonial shorthand for “the exotic East”.
Maintaining the James Bond connection is The Man with the Golden Gun (1974; Amazon Prime), in which Bond (Roger Moore) turns up in Macau on the trail of dodgy character Lazar, supplier of hitman Scaramanga’s gold bullets.
