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Review
by Kozo: |
Expectations
for Hong Kong Cinema drop even further thanks to the
arrival of Kung Fu Mahjong 3, a sequel in name
only to the not-quite-classic Kung Fu Mahjong
and Kung Fu Mahjong 2. The reason they made
this film is obvious: in the film business, familiarity
usually equals money in the bank, though the meager
grosses of Kung Fu Mahjong 2 would seem to
be red flag warning to any alert moviemaker. No dice,
this is a Wong Jing production, meaning the moviemeister
hits us hard and fast with as much cheap silliness
as he can muster.
The benefit is that silly can sometimes
equal funny, but the epic cheapness spells doom for KFM3. Not only do we have a cast devoid of
proven cinema stars, but the production values are
noticeably bad, and are marred with poor continuity
and a "I heard it in the elevator" synthesizer
soundtrack. The worst blow of all is that there's
no kung fu. That's right: Kung Fu Mahjong 3 has no kung fu whatsoever. That screaming you hear
is us pulling our hair out.
Okay, the Chinese title
for Kung Fu Mahjong 3 doesn't actually mention
kung fu, so that inaccuracy is only felt by the Chinese-illiterate.
Still, given the lack of quality in the resulting
film, we'll nitpick all we want. TVB actor Roger Kwok
stars as Ken, a mahjong whiz whose luck with the tiles
is legendary. However, Ken loses his mojo when he
decides to date Nancy (TVB star Shirley Yeung), a
pretty young thing who curses whoever she comes into
physical contact with amazingly bad luck.
Upon first
meeting Shirley, Ken is warned point blank of her
cursed history, but he loses his mind and decides
to start snogging her anyway, whereupon his luck disappears
just like she said it would. Smart.His sudden run
of bad luck puts his future in jeopardy, as he's supposed
to be heir to a gambling empire. His ailing dad (Ha
Yu) can't very well leave the casinos to his out-of-luck
son, so the consensus is that dad's hot young wife
Sophie (Patricia Liu) should take over the biz. Unfortunately,
Sophie is in league with rat bastard Bowie (Chan Bo-Yuen),
meaning the fix is in to take over Ken's family business.
Can Ken get back his luck in time to take on Bowie
and Sophie at the final mahjong duel? And will Chan
Bak-Cheung manage to ruin the film with his trademark
annoying presence?
To answer that last
question, Chan Bak-Cheung doesn't ruin the film, because
the filmmakers do all the work for him. Kung Fu
Mahjong 3 doesn't start off with much promise - it's noticeably cheap, glacially paced, and features
an appearance by Sammy - but at least the plot seems
to hit its generic gambling movie marks fairly well.
However, the bottom drops out when Ken has to get
his luck back. He goes to Chan Bak-Cheung, who plays
out-of-luck gambler Grand Slam Ben, who now teaches
gambling addicts to quit. His method: forcing them
to lose on fixed games until they get sick of it.
Obviously, Ken can't be taught to lose because he
still has to win the final duel, so Ben teaches Ken
the virtue of positive thinking and befriending the
mahjong tiles, which leads to numerous scenes of Ken
acting in a "glass half-full" manner. Get
beaten up? Laugh it off. Get a crappy hand at mahjong?
Smile through it. Win with only 1 or 2 points instead
of the usual 8-10? Smile and thank your mahjong tiles
for helping you out, preferably with sweet words and
even some light petting of the tiles. The message
foisted upon the audience (besides get intimate with
your mahjong tiles) is basically this: lower your
expectations and even a complete disaster (like maybe
this movie) can be appreciated. It's great that the
movie attempts to enlighten us with the power of positive
thinking, but this is a lesson that one can usually
get for free. Assuming that you paid for this movie,
you should be owed more than a counseling pep talk.
But you won't get it.
Kung Fu Mahjong 3 never gets funnier or more
interesting, leaving the audience with a few things
to ponder. First of all, did Kung Fu Mahjong 2 really make enough money to warrant this sequel? Number
two, where is the logic in all of this? Ken loses
his luck thanks to Nancy, but by putting on a positive
attitude he's supposed to overcome her supposedly
unbeatable curse AND win a mahjong tournament against
a bunch of incredibly skilled players. How exactly
does that work? And why are we wasting time even debating
the logic of a Wong Jing mahjong movie? And finally,
are people really fooled into thinking this sort of
cheap, unimaginative stuff is passable cinema anymore?
Maybe once upon a time it would work because they
threw in nifty action and/or stunts, plus featured
more stars per acre than a Hollywood rehab clinic.
But those were proven stars with long cinema track
records. Here, we only get popular TVB names, which
may interest local audiences but not the international
ones, who won't grow to like any of these newer stars
if they're packaged in such tired stuff. The familiar
faces don't fare much better; the pairing of Yuen
Qiu and Yuen Wah has little novelty left, and the
duo doesn't even meet in this film as Yuen Wah only
has a minor cameo. Chan Bak-Cheung is good for a couple
of laughs, but his ghastly dyed-blond hair could be
funnier than he is. It's a sad state of affairs here.
At this point in a review,
we usually drag out some positives, like saying that
the lead actors are charismatic or likable, or that
there's a gut-busting good joke midway through the
film. We won't be doing that here. It's not because
the actors are necessarily bad or that there aren't
any decent jokes. No, we won't dig for KFM3's
positives because we refuse to give into the film's
force-fed notion that a glass should be viewed as
half-full. It makes no sense that a chipper attitude
would enable a luckless individual to win a winner-take-all
mahjong tournament, so why should we apply that logic
to our subpar moviegoing experience? True, cheap cinema
like this likely serves a purpose to undemanding audiences
accustomed to the idea that Hong Kong produces crap,
but given the state of the cinema, wouldn't it be
better to actually try? Ditch KFM3 and try
for some new comedy formula that hasn't been seen,
and has a better possibility of succeeding. Hong Kong
Cinema needs reinvention, though we may have said
that back in 1999, too.
Then again, if they did achieve
success with a new comedy formula, then they'd probably
run that into the ground too with umpteen sequels
that have no business being made. Sigh. The overwhelming
frustration conjured up by this film could make a
person swear off Hong Kong movies for good. So let's
look at bright side: this movie's official English
title is Kung Fu Mahjong 3 - The Final Duel.
That title implies that there WON'T be a Kung Fu
Mahjong 4, a notion that somehow puts an extra
spring into our step. Message to Wong Jing: we've
never asked you to keep a promise before, but we're
asking now. Let this series die. (Kozo 2007) |
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