Traces of Justice

CinemaSerf 11/13/2026 3:52:45PM 8.4

This reminded me of one of those American wartime features from the "Crime Does Not Pay" series, where we are shown just how scientific methods are helping the police to track down criminals. Eighty-odd years later, Sicheng Chen has updated the theme using renowned forensic scientist "Cui Xun" (Yi Zhang) to develop some new ways of crime solving - just like a modern-day "Sherlock Holmes" (Jeremy Brett rather than Basil Rathbone). Anyway, here we have four investigations that see him trailblaze identification techniques using photography, fingernails and even some bite marks to apprehend some fairly serious miscreants. Firstly, though, he has to convince the sceptical police chief "Wang" (Minghao Chen) who is always under constant pressure to provide an 100% clear-up rate rather than ensure they actually get the right culprit, but once the latter man realises the value and integrity of his new ally, they begin to achieve some impressive results. It's set across a timeframe starting in the early 1970s and runs through until the 1990s and by using some flashbacks of his life tries to produce a running template for his increasingly complex investigations. Personally, I felt the whole thing rather disjointed and more a collection of separate adventures, almost, with some - notably the first about a child rapist - engaging better than others - notably another which went into a little too much data about the investigative value of human poo . There is a great deal of dialogue; none of the acting really sets anything afire and though it does start off quite interestingly, it sort of peters out a little disappointingly before ending in a sort of predictably valedictorian fashion.