Another
miss for me, although this one is an admitted step up from Come Fly the Dragon. Whereas
that film is sort of aggressively lame, this one is more weird than anything
else, albeit not a very good kind of weird.
Shing and
his buddy are a pair of comic book artists struggling to get their boss to give
their ideas a chance. When an accident
causes a momentary collision between this world and the next, a comely ghost
sneaks through who just happens to look like a princess Shing draws in his
comic. The ghost, Ching Ching, latches
onto Shing and uses her magical powers to improve his luck.
Okay, so
mostly, this movie is busy and random.
There’s a bunch of different stuff going on: first Shing is afraid of Ching Ching, then he
loves her, then she’s using her powers to help him, then she can’t use her
powers or bad things will happen to her, then Shing has to stop having good luck or bad things will happen to her, then
there’s these other ghosts and a pair of ghost-fighting neighbors and stuff
going on with that… There are probably plots for three or four movies crammed
together here, but all of them are inattentive and half-done, so it doesn’t
come together into a coherent film.
Tony
Leung Chiu-wai plays Shing. He’s a
different kind of character for Leung, a bit of a nerdy everyman. It’s funny to see familiar sort of tropes
playing out in a movie from a different culture. Shing is presented as a mostly-decent guy who
can’t catch a break, a slight geek who loves his work and watching Japanese
cartoons, is continually crapped on by his boss, and scorns the “ugly” young
woman from his apartment who’s in love with him. Then, out of nowhere, he meets this gorgeous
supernatural creature who’s immediately taken with him despite there not being
anything all that special about him. (Not
that, for the most part, I think Shing is a bad
guy or anything – the film just doesn’t really do anything to show why Ching Ching would like him, apart
from Leung’s looks, which are only slightly nerded up.) Everywhere in the world, it seems, movies are
full of mediocre guys and the beautiful women who love them.
As such,
there’s nothing too demanding about Shing, despite being rather against type
for Leung. There’s some sad-trombone
humor, a little slapstick, some freaked out moments, some romance, and a
culminating action bit. Leung is dubbed
in the copy I saw, which always makes it a little tougher to access his
performance; it doesn’t hold back his talent any in great films like Hero or Red Cliff, but in something like this, which isn’t all that good
anyway, it further separates me from his character.
Recommend?
In
General
– Naw. Too goofy and random, not enough
holding the disparate parts together.
Tony
Leung Chiu-wai
– Not a must. There’s nothing too
challenging here for Leung to do.
Warnings
Sexual
content, language, drinking, and violence.
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