Arrested Memory. Frontal Underload.

Arrested Memory (Sabu, 2026) is a curious movie, splitting the difference between an emotional journey, action picture and crime comedy. While enjoyable and oftentimes effective on a scene-by-scene level, it fails to cohere in any meaningful way. Veteran Japanese director Sabu seems to be having a lot of fun shooting in Taiwan, but this story of a cop with memory loss scrambles the brain as opposed to activating all the right pleasure centres. 

Ethan Juan stars as Lee, a crack police captain with martial arts skills. After a drug bust gone wrong, in which he loses most of his men, his memory begins to deteriorate, making it hard for him to concentrate on work. This is unbeknownst to the new team that want to work with him, roping him into a low-key remake of Highest to Lowest (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), helping a Japanese businessman (Shinichi Tsutsumi) to find his son. What ensues is a scrappy mélangé of clashing tones as Lee attempts to reunite this Japanese family, all the while dealing with his own poor memory. 

The problem with films that rely on a character’s memory coming back is that they are very fragmented-flashback-heavy, which, if done poorly, as they are here, can be straight-up irritating, as well as cheap, with the memory often coming back just at the moment that our protagonist needs it. Particularly egregious is the sloppiness of the reveal; nothing really triggers Lee’s sudden remembrance — it just happens. For a great memory loss picture, for example, Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), it helps when the director is able to explain the rules of the game, so that we don’t feel short-changed by the action. 

Perhaps it would have been less annoying if the comedic parts of the film — self-absorbed characters crashing into each other at inopportune moments — were better handled. Yet for a scrappy movie like this to work a lá Elmore Leonard, the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino, the loopy crime logic has to a) fit in a satisfying way, b) reveal itself to be cleverer than it initially seems and c) actually be spontaneous and funny. Arrested Memory has moments of brilliance — like a smart phone call scene — but its overall execution is riddled with cheap shortcuts, simply rewriting what we have seen rather than letting us see it from the right angle. It doesn’t help that the martial arts scenes aren’t particularly kinetic either, featuring a bunch of judo throws I’m pretty sure I learned to get my yellow belt back when I was nine years old. I always thought judo was the most low energy of the martial arts — this film doesn’t do much to dispel that notion.