Fantastic Fest 2024 Review: ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY (2024)

“Holding Out For A Hero” always works like gangbusters.

That’s not the main takeaway from ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY.

The biggest insight gained from the film is that writer/director Li Yang has crafted a frenetic love letter to youthful exuberance and friendship that explodes off the screen in wonderfully inventive and bizarrely clever ways that will pump up any audience.

But, when Bonnie Tyler’s vocals for “Holding Out For A Hero” began to play during a climactic event, I nodded approvingly because the 1984 song first crafted for FOOTLOOSE (and produced and co-written by Jim Steinman) always slaps in movie form. Whether it’s SHORT CIRCUIT 2 or SHREK 2 or BULLET TRAIN or that one episode of Loki or whatever—it’s impossible to deny just how stirring of a bop it is and how much energy it grants its cinematic counterparts.

Wang Zha, Wang Chengyong, and Paopao are high schoolers in 1997 on the distant Planet K—which is basically like ours except the days are only 12 hours long and there’s been some various differences over the years because of that. But they still have high school, crushes, Street Fighter II, crushes, pop stars, crime, and everything else that we have back here on Earth. The three best friends manage to get themselves into trouble and mixed up with various toxic materials that, when any of them sneeze, catapults their consciousness into their bodies 20 years in the future. What’s the world like in 2017? Not that different really—still full of bright spots and dark elements. How has their lives turned out? That is surprising, and it’s up to the trio to navigate their new worlds while trying to figure out how their “present” (1997) leads them to such fates. Throw in a nefarious body harvesting black market gang, an intrepid reporter, and a maniacal plot to rule the world and it turns out that things get pretty complicated pretty quickly as adults.

ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY feels like a new cinematic language that writer/director Li Yang has crafted from animation, video games, comedies, teen dramas, comic books, sci-fi films, and time travel stories. The closest analog to what you’re witnessing is SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD with its own blending of live action and cartoons and genres and CGI and more, all with the angsty heart of a romantic young fuck up at its center. And yet, even with those similarities, ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY remains its own beast as viewers navigate these three lives in two time periods and all of the emotions that come along. The film is incredibly fun and a blast of raw energy, but it does so without sacrificing heart or drama; this isn’t just an epic tale in the literal sense but also one of big feelings that feel appropriate for high school folks staring down their futures.

Not everything works perfectly in ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY. As Fantastic Fest programmer Austin King noted in his intro, this is not the movie for folks that get hung up on plot holes or contrivances. The time travel aspect (where events in the past sometimes, but not always, influence the future) is wonky at best and to diagram out the narrative would be a bunch of weird scribbles that lead to frustration and madness. But the fact is that it has that sort of little kid game logic where things just happen out of necessity for the story (or the emotion), yet it doesn’t feel like a cheat or that Yang is taking any shortcuts. The film is simply too entertaining to be denied, with great humor and spectacle, so you go along for the ride and find yourself having a much better time than if you dared quibble every time the plot sort of stumbled over itself.

The cast is great, with the three characters being played by teens and then adults for each timeline. But Elane Zhong is especially impressive as a badass journalist that aids the main trio, getting some excellent fighting sequences and her chemistry with grown up Wang Zha is a true delight. ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY is silly but not vacuous; it reflects that larger-than-life feelings of having a crush or redefining oneself or hating one’s job in outsized ways that perfectly fit those operatic emotions. It has outstanding music (with tremendous needle drops, including Miss Tyler’s song) and terrific visuals that makes for a genuinely unique experience which will rouse the romantic within even the grimmest curmudgeon’s heart. With ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY, Li Yang has crafted a film that had me smiling for 98 minutes. Does that mean he’s the cinematic hero for whom I’ve been holding out? Possibly. All I know is that “Holding Out For A Hero” is a great tune and ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY is a great time in the theater.