"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Saturday, December 16, 2017

A Little TLC(w): Hero Beyond the Boundary of Time (1993)

This might have fallen under the category of “kind of low-rent comedy that I know isn’t very good but that I sort-of like anyway,” but it wound up falling short of that for me.  While the quality is fairly in line with some of Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s other dubious comedies like Happy-Go-Lucky or The Royal Scoundrel, aspects of the humor get too uncomfortable for me to really enjoy it.

During the Ching Dynasty, the Emperor is suffering from a mysterious ailment, and for whatever reason, it’s believed that the only way to cure it is to find him a bride.  And also for whatever reason, this bride is prophesied to be living 300 years in the future.  Fortunately, they just so happen to have a time machine recently captured from their enemies on hand, and the Emperor sends his friend Wai Siu-Bo forward to the 20th century to find his predestined queen.

There’s admittedly some decent stuff going for this movie.  The Ching Dynasty time-travel hijinks are over-the-top but amusing, as Siu-Bo inevitably wreaks havoc while trying to navigate the future, ostensibly working toward his mission but mainly having fun in the ‘90s.  I like watching him break out the kung fu on random gangsters and always act entirely on top of things even when he blatantly has no idea what’s going on (there’s a fun scene of him making forceful demands about the food in a restaurant where he doesn’t know the first thing about what he’s ordering.)

I’ve never heard of Wai Siu-Bo, but apparently he’s a famous character from a novel about this time period and has made appearances in Chinese pop culture before (I understand that Stephen Chow has played him as well.)  Evidently, Siu-Bo’s shtick is that he’s a screw-up and a horndog with ties to powerful people who causes a lot of (usually-unintentional?) trouble.  That’s basically what we get here, and it’s in the “horndog” part that I run into problems.  Not the mere fact of it itself – I’ve enjoyed (to a point) other admittedly-problematic characters like that before on sitcoms, like Howard from The Big Bang Theory or Barney from How I Met Your Mother.  And aspects of the sexual humor are funny, like Siu-Bo’s seven wives in the past wearing him out with their voracious and adventurous appetites, along with some of his exploits in the future.  However, there are also parts where it gets supremely uncomfortable.  There are way too many rape jokes that go too far, and especially with everything that’s been in the news of the last few months, I’m just not in the mood to stomach that kind of thing.

Which is a bummer.  Leung as Siu-Bo is often funny, a sometimes-charming rogue with a high opinion of himself but not quite all the competence needed to back that up.  He’s great fun steamrolling his way through situations he knows nothing about, and he especially plays well off of Chiu, the low-level cop he co-opts to help him on his mission.  Some of the comedy gets eye-rollingly broad, and Leung plays to the rafters at times, but for the most part, he hits the mark in a more entertaining, just shy of over-the-top way.  So, it’s a shame that Siu-Bo’s lascivious traits can veer off in such a creepy direction.

Recommend?

In General – No.  The time-travel business is amusing, and I might have given it a cautious recommendation like some of Leung’s other middling comedies, but the rape jokes are just too gross for me.

Tony Leung Chiu-wai – As much as I’d like to say “maybe,” because a good chunk of his performance is quite a bit of fun (and to be fair, other characters he’s played have had very brief moments that go to the same uncomfortable places,) I can’t really recommend it.

Warnings

Sexual content (including rape jokes,) violence, language, and drinking.

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