I had high hopes for this show…
The trailer is good, the poster is cool, the story sounds interesting, the reviews are excellent, and the awards it received were also very impressive… Not to mention the director is Patrick Tam, mentor to my favourite director, Wong Kar Wai.
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But it turned out to be a real disappointment…For one thing… 2 mins into the movie, and Kay was complaining about jump cuts… That is pretty unforgivable for an reputable film I think…
Plot: (Taken from a review by NYTimes)
There was a time when Chow Cheong-shing (Aaron Kwok) was considered a smooth-talking ladies’ man, but many years of gambling have turned him into a bitter and abusive shell of his former self. When Chow’s admiring young son (Gow Ian Iskander) reveals to his father that his mother is packing her bags and planning a hasty getaway, the enraged Chow delivers a merciless beating to the woman that leaves father and son to fend for themselves. Now forced to resort to petty thievery as a means of helping dad pay off a series of lingering gambling debts, the young boy soon ends up locked away in a juvenile-detention facility. Soon thereafter, when Chow drops by to visit his son, the boy launches a vicious attack on his father that drives the pair apart for more than a decade. Years later, Chow’s son has grown into a man, and is suddenly stricken with an overpowering bout of nostalgia and that leads him back to his old hometown and the quiet streets of his youth. Just then, far off in the distance, the emotionally scarred son catches a glimpse of a man who appears to be his father.
The story sounds good right??
For some reason, a lot of that emotion didn’t come thru. It wasn’t even the problem of the actors… This was probably Aaron Kwok’s best acting that I’ve seen in years… Charlie Yeung and Ian Gow were good too… (I also loved that the movie was set in Malaysia… It seems relatively more familiar than if it were set in say Hongkong.)
I’d attribute the problem to the post production editing… The story didn’t seem to have a build up to a climax… The setting and characters were established all right… But the pace did not pick up from there. That made the first part of the show seem too long drawn, boring even…
Another problem was the fact that I read the reviews ahead of time and was waiting for the action to happen… But it didn’t happen whenever I expected it to… The ending was even more abrupt! I knew it was the end because of the reviews, but the rest of the audience in the theatre went “What? End already?”
That cannot be a very good sign.
I suspected that we didn’t get to watch the full 160min version, which Tam himself professed to be the best. Cos I noticed that some of the scenes from the trailer were missing!
I found out later that there are three versions: one for China, one for Malaysia, and one for the rest of the world. It’s fine that we didn’t get the full version. We didn’t even get the version our neighbours got! The websites say that the China version is 120mins and incidentally, that’s the runtime of the movie as shown on Shaw’s website. Man…
TBP Rating: Find that elusive 160min version. Otherwise, don’t watch.