Aaron Kwok’s real acting talent, or the lack of it, has been a subject of much contention since he was twice crowned Best Actor at Taiwan’s Golden Horse awards in 2005 and 2006. But after his overacting masterclass in the roundly ridiculed Murderer last year, the Cantopop star-turned actor suddenly found himself with an urgent case to prove. And what could be a better project to play restrained than a good old-fashioned Chinese period epic? Set in Shanxi (“the Wall Street of China”) during the turbulent final years of the Qing Dynasty, Empire of Silver sees Kwok transform – almost too easily – from the good-for-nothing third son of the powerful Kang family to the humanist successor of its century-old banking enterprise, after a series of misfortunes befall his three brothers.

Courtesy of first-time writer-director Christina Yao’s adaptation of Cheng Yi’s three-volume historical novel, The Silver Valley, Kwok gets to star, his eyes ever-welling as usual, opposite two great actors of today’s Chinese cinema: Hao Lei (Summer Palace) and veteran actor Zhang Tielin. Despite the film’s disjointed narrative and occasionally uneven pacing, the central conflicts between the son and his imperious father (Zhang) – over issues as varied as their contrasting management philosophies, the different degrees of importance they attribute to the endangered family bloodline, and the son’s painful affair with his stepmother (Hao), who married the senior Kang despite having developed mutual attraction with the junior since their adolescence – are rarely short of absorbing. It’s true that Kwok’s performance never rises above the ordinary; but in these perilous, post-Murderer times, that’s still an improvement.

Edmund Lee

Dir Christina Yao, Category IIB, 113 mins, opens Thursday 28