The good: Men Suddenly in Love is short, and runs at only 88 minutes. It features some brand-new babes du jour (Betrys Kong, Carol Yeung, Jessica Xu, among them), plus the reigning queen of the babe du jour title, Chrissie Chau. This update of Wong Jing’s multi-star romcoms gets points for being randier than usual, with some welcome innuendo and even dark laughs spicing things up. Also, the expected movie parodies do serve up some zingers. Chief among them is a hilarious riff on Lust, Caution with Jim Chim doing his best Tony Leung Chiu-Wai impression while sitting on a toilet. Also, there’s some nifty genre work on offer; Men Suddenly in Love is basically Chasing Girls by way of Patrick Kong, in that it takes Kong’s cynical cleverness and tacks them onto a usually insipid and predictable genre. That minor twist, slight though it may be, is worth notice.

The bad: oh, where shall I begin. The story is more like an outline, with plot arranged into a lifeless parade of scenes concentrating on each uninteresting character one-by-one. Their teacher, Master Jude (Richard Ng), is on his last legs, so his former students (Eric Tsang, Jim Chim, Chapman To, Wong Jing and Di Yee-Tat) take him out for one last horny swing at the fences. Unfortunately, he croaks, and requests that his students honor him by calling out his name while in the throes of passion with the five lovelies they just met, who are played by Chrissie Chau and her gang of questionable thespian girls. The problem: they’re all married and kind of unattractive. No matter, THE HOT YOUNG GIRLS GO FOR THEM ANYWAY. Yes, I just used capitals, but it must be done because it defies belief. Maybe Chapman To could score with a hot babe, but Eric Tsang is somehow able to entice Chrissie Chau to sleep with him in the back of a truck. Whose deluded fantasy is this?

The ugly: all of it. This is a decades-old formula, and considering that the 80s versions also starred Wong Jing and Eric Tsang, you can see how incredibly out-of-touch the formula is. Men Suddenly in Love is a middle-aged man’s fantasy, where you can push sixty years of age and still have a nubile 23-year-old girl rub up against you. Sure, movies are largely fantastic in conception, but I’m calling shenanigans on this particular idea. Add to this the crappy production values and lousy storytelling (the executive director is Lee Kung-Lok, who looks to have phoned this one in), and you have a poor excuse for a Hong Kong film, much less any narrative work professing to be worth your time. Ready for the lightning round? Chapman To: must you bare your ass in every film? Maggie Cheung Ho-Yee: are roles like this preferable to working at TVB? Eric Tsang: are the Kee Wah bakeries not paying you enough that you still have to make crap movies? Jim Chim: aren’t you an actor? Hong Kong audiences: don’t you want something more?

Probably you do, and it’s called Avatar, which made more box office in HK than this movie will ever sniff. Still, Men Suddenly in Love cost pennies to produce, and likely made back all its money in cable presales and product placement that the audience never noticed because they were too busy talking on their mobile phone or using Twitter. Financial tip: if you balance your ancillary sales against your upfront costs, you’ll walk away with a tidy profit before your [bad] film flops at the theater. Cable channels in all Chinese-speaking territories need new content regardless of quality, and you can also release a DVD - but people usually rip them and throw them on BitTorrent, so forget I mentioned DVDs. It’s cable for the win! I’m just guessing that this is the business model at work, and if I’m wrong, my bad. If not, well, toldja. Either way, they made Men Suddenly in Love and it still exists like the unfortunate thing it is. We should know the drill by now: Wong Jing makes crappy movies because he can make money doing it. Replace his name with 50% of all working film producers and the shoe still fits. The lesson: figure out who the other 50% are and stick with them. (Kozo 2011)

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