Entertainment

‘Girl’ needs an escort

This action thriller proclaims its neo-noir allegiance from the first pan across city buildings at night, to our antihero Jake (Jason Yee) holding the dead body of Sandy (Samantha Streets), the teenage prostitute he chastely loved.

To director David Ren and cinematographer Max Da-Yung Wang’s credit, the film maintains that ultra-artificial style. Emphatic movie references range from Clara Bow to “Double Indemnity” as Jake martial-arts his way through every bad guy in town in the effort to find Sandy’s killer.

Avenging Sandy means Jake busts up an awful lot of working girl/client encounters. You have never seen so much painful coitus interruptus in your life. But the old tropes, such as half-shadowed faces behind desks and smoky long shots of a man getting kicked while he’s down, still look good.

So deadpan are the dialogue and narration that it’s hard to tell whether the laughs are intentional. What with all the shrieking, dumb bad-girl hookers and the wistful, wounded good-girl hookers, the sexism is so creepy it might be an ironic genre critique. Then again, maybe it’s just creepy.

The Polanski worship is right in Jake’s name, and Ren’s film often seems like what you’d get if you showed “Chinatown” to a director 20 times over 48 hours, then dropped the guy on his head. At times off-putting, at other times outright campy, “The Girl From the Naked Eye” does offer a measured amount of queasy fun.