General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Godspeed (一路顺风)

Godspeed (一路順風; Yi lu shun feng) is a 2016 Taiwanese road film directed, written, and shot by Chung Mong-hong, in which a small-time drug courier hails a taxi driven by a down-on-his-luck Hong Kong immigrant and the two travel from Taipei to southern Taiwan to deliver a package for gangsters.¹^•² It premiered at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, opened in Taiwan on 18 November 2016, and received eight nominations at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Art Design.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director	Chung Mong-hong (鍾孟宏), who also wrote and shot the film¹^•⁵
Year and country	Taiwan, 2016; 111 minutes, DCP, color³
Release	Premiered 9 September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival; Taiwan theatrical release 18 November 2016⁶^•⁷
Cast	Michael Hui as taxi driver Old Hui (Lao Xu); Na Dow (Lin Yu-chih) as the courier Nadow; Leon Dai, Tu Tsung-hua, Chen Yi-wen, Wu Chung-tien in supporting roles²^•⁷
Languages	Mandarin, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Thai, and Cantonese, with English subtitles¹^•⁸
Awards	8 nominations at the 53rd Golden Horse Awards (2016), won Best Art Design; Best Film from Mainland China and Taiwan at the 36th Hong Kong Film Awards (2017)⁴^•⁸
Rating	18+ (Taiwan); M18 in Singapore for coarse language and drug use³^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Nadow, a petty crook played by Na Dow, answers a newspaper advertisement and becomes a drug courier for a mob boss. His method of transport is deliberately mundane: each morning he hails a random taxi, rides from the north of Taiwan to the south to deliver a package, and returns in the same cab that night.¹⁰ On one run the cab that stops is driven by Old Hui (Lao Xu), played by Michael Hui, a Hong Kong native who moved to Taipei more than two decades earlier, failed in business, and drives a battered taxi as his only source of income.²^•⁷

The delivery goes wrong. The pair are swindled along the way, stumble into a gang boss's funeral, and become entangled in a dog-eat-dog gangland shooting; the drugs and the money disappear, and Hui and Nadow end up held hostage.⁴^•¹¹ The Film Society of Lincoln Center's synopsis describes the film as a postmodern reinvention of the comedic double act, with the two unsuspecting mules bickering over money, exchanging anecdotes about the meaning of life, and suffering bad luck driven largely by Lao Xu's poor decision-making, while the southern gangsters they are driving toward tear each other apart in betrayal.¹ Through the shared ordeal the two strangers, initially without affection for each other, come to form a bond and speak about their own vulnerabilities.¹²

Cast and characters

Michael Hui Koon-man, the Hong Kong comedy legend known from the Hui Brothers comedies, plays Old Hui in what the South China Morning Post called a remarkably restrained performance, a role the reviewer described as tailor-made for him.² It was Hui's first appearance in a Taiwanese film.⁵ Na Dow, a television host also known as Lin Yu-chih, plays the courier; Leon Dai plays the gangster Ta-Pao, and Tu Tsung-hua plays Brother Tou.²^•¹³ The film has no female lead; Central News Agency coverage at the time noted the all-male principal cast.¹⁴

Production and director

Chung Mong-hong is a writer-director-cinematographer with an MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; his earlier features include Parking, The Fourth Portrait (for which he won the Golden Horse Award for Best Director), and Soul, and he later made A Sun and The Falls.¹¹ On Godspeed he worked with his regular crew: he shot the film himself under his cinematographer pseudonym Nagao Nakajima (中島長雄), with music by Tseng Su-min and production by Yeh Ju-feng and Tseng Shao-chien.¹⁵^•¹³ Production companies included 3 Ng Film, Taipei Postproduction, Arrow Film Production Co., and Huace Pictures.¹³

Reception and awards

At the 53rd Golden Horse Awards in 2016, Godspeed led the field with eight nominations, including Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Art Design, Best Makeup and Costume Design, and Best Original Film Score; it won one award, Best Art Design.⁴^•⁵ In April 2017 it won Best Film from Mainland China and Taiwan at the 36th Hong Kong Film Awards, and it was also nominated for Best Film at the 11th Asian Film Awards.⁸^•⁶

The film screened at the 2016 Toronto and Tokyo international film festivals and opened the 2016 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival.³^•⁷ Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the Tomatometer stood at 33 percent from three reviews.¹³ Shelly Kraicer, writing in Cinema Scope, praised Chung's "dazzling sense of colour and provocative off-kilter compositions"; James Mudge of easternKicks gave it 3.5 of 5, calling it an idiosyncratic take on the road movie for patient viewers; Laura Davis of One Room With A View gave it 2 of 5, judging Chung overambitious in spanning so many genres.¹³ A Toronto festival review likewise found the mix of violence and slow-burn humor uneven, though it called Hui a pleasure to watch.¹⁰ On IMDb the film holds a weighted rating of 6.7 out of 10 from about 1,000 users, with the most ratings from Taiwan, the United States, China, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.¹⁶

Box office

In Taiwan the film opened on 18 November 2016 against Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and other new releases.⁴ In Hong Kong it ran from 5 to 27 January 2017, 23 days, grossing HK$375,933 on 6,856 admissions.¹⁷

Style and themes

The film blends black comedy, road movie, and crime thriller, a combination the Taiwan Film Institute's yearbook noted as more approachable than Chung's earlier Soul (2013) while retaining his distinct visual signature.¹⁸ The Golden Horse Festival synopsis frames the journey along the island's western edge as also running along the edge of the characters' lives, with the two men's bickering giving way to a wary companionship.⁵ Old Hui's displacement is a central thread: a Hong Kong native of some twenty years in Taiwan who, as one commentary puts it, feels fully at home in neither place, married to a Taiwanese wife yet unable to find stability in his family life.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2015–2019 films › Crime drama and neo-noir films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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