Directed by Zhang Yimou. Starring Sun Honglei, Xiao Shen-Yang, and Yan Ni. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, September 24, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Top Chinese director Zhang Yimou is no stranger to film noir. He already had his kick at the James M. Cain in Ju Dou, a period-piece variation on The Postman Always Rings Twice. The Coen brothers were going for the same thing in Blood Simple, so it shouldn’t be too shocking that Zhang, in remaking the Coens’ first film, has played it for laughs.

Here, the roadside tavern has been replaced by a feudal-era restaurant, and in a desert setting so remote and forbidding (and beautiful) that you have to wonder where the customers come from. In any case, we’re told that it has made Wang (Ni Dahong) fabulously wealthy, and there’s enough money for the woman of the title, his wife (Yan Ni), to purchase a newfangled weapon from a passing Persian merchant.

She’s been having an affair with Wang’s ninny of an assistant (Xiao Shen-Yang, who wears lavender, cries, and falls down a lot); now she wants him to bump off her husband, an ugly brute who makes her pose for dirty pictures. (Remember, in the centuries before photography, that was a bigger chore than it is today.) But Wang knows something is up and hires a stone-faced detective (The Road Home’s Sun Honglei) to get rid of the younger lovers—thus unleashing a series of increasingly harsh twists that spin out of control.

This slick, good-looking tale may be full of references to old proverbs, myths, and Chinese opera, but the humour is more Three Stooges than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the movie’s reason for being is never quite clear. There’s only one (highly choreographed) sequence of noodle-making, though, and it’s pretty exciting.