Forge (2025) Movie Review: A Well-Meaning Drama about Artistic Pursuit Held Back by a Lackluster Investigative Thriller

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Jing Ai Ng’s feature film debut, “Forge,” feels both dated and relevant. Written and directed by Ng, the film revolves around two criminals who make a living by forging old paintings and selling them to gullible art collectors. The premise feels dated because artificial intelligence now makes it permissible for anyone to steal from artists, given the lack of compensation for the humans who actually created the artworks their prompts emulate, while operating in a hitherto unregulated space that enables the free flow of their ‘art.’ Simultaneously, the film feels relevant because it follows a genuinely talented artist who is undervalued and unappreciated despite her talent, and is forced to consider forgery as the only viable option to make use of her artistic skills.

The script becomes even more layered with the forger Coco Zhang (Andie Ju) being a woman of color trying to make a living in the West. So, besides the overbearing pressures of artistic pursuits, she has at least a few more challenges to face and overcome to be deemed as important as her more privileged peers. Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran), an FBI agent who gets assigned to find the forger/s, faces partially similar challenges at her workplace. With that underlying narrative thread, the script analyzes themes relevant to the East Asian diaspora and its survival.

Coco, the primary protagonist, lives in Florida with her brother and partner-in-crime, Raymond (Brandon Soo Hoo). They manage to run a forgery ring for a while without getting caught, while otherwise being involved in the operations of their family-owned restaurant business. Eventually, their scam is put under a microscope when Emily moves to Florida to find the culprit/s.

Ng’s script follows the siblings’ and Emily’s stories simultaneously, while making Holden Beaumont (Edmund Donovan) the third part of the puzzle. Unlike Emily or the Zhangs, Holden is a filthy-rich, spoiled white man, using his ancestral wealth recklessly, often disregarding the parties involved in business with him, while being overprotective of his own status.

Holden represents an archetype that Jesse Armstrong famously satirized throughout the four seasons of “Succession,” while also giving more than an insight into the characters’ internal landscapes. “Forge” doesn’t paint a similarly vivid picture of Holden’s interiority and offers only a serviceable critique of this type of person. That’s why, beyond a few evocative moments, the film never quite delivers when it comes to criticizing his shallow and solipsistic endeavors.

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It misses the mark in this regard, especially when compared to shows like Lee Sung Jin’s “Beef” that managed to dig much deeper than the obvious critiques of its white characters’ relationship with different cultures. Ng’s intentions seem sincere, but the result doesn’t leave a strong impression, as it does in the aforesaid projects.

Unlike Holden’s characterization that lacks the necessary punch, the Zhangs’ and Emily’s arcs remain underwhelming for a different reason. Even here, Ng’s intentions seem earnest, but the film suffers from a lack of tonal balance. Her script pits the two parties (the Zhangs and Emily) against each other in a cat-and-mouse chase, but the investigative aspects fail to capture one’s attention. These details are not nearly as compelling as the intricacies of Asian American lives that she explores, which seldom get discussed in Western projects, even now.

The film highlights why people from such communities value communal living instead of the hyperindividualist modes of survival, often fostered in the West. It also brings to attention some fascinating details about interpersonal faith, compassion, and biases among such diasporic communities in ways that extend beyond the usual explorations of their existence.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t have the same bite when it transitions to its investigative aspects. The way Ng portrays Emily’s findings and observations feels bland and occasionally derivative. While trading in the usual beats of cop-and-criminal thrillers, it also feels contrived at certain points. Characters act or react in ways that make little sense, as they suddenly defy how their motivations are established up to that moment. That leaves some of its crucial moments feeling underdeveloped (or under-analyzed), where a more robust emotional build-up would have sufficed to make its climax hit as hard as it could have.

It follows a story that could have had moments as thrilling and memorable as the iconic scenes from Michael Mann’s “Heat,” where two sides of the law speak about what separates or connects them. Instead, it offers a tepid representation of a similar dynamic between Coco/Raymond and Emily. Perhaps a script with a clear focus on one of its characters instead of jumping between different storylines could have made it far more potent.

However, “Forge” comes at a time when we rarely get a film that isn’t borrowing its narrative from an existing IP. That unintentional connection to its themes of originality and replication, which it explores sufficiently well, makes you want to be more appreciative of its sheer existence.