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Help!!!



Cecilia Cheung, Ekin Cheng and Jordan Chan need Help!!!

Chinese: 辣手回春  
Year: 2000
Director: Johnnie To Kei-Fung, Wai Ka-Fai
Writer: Wai Ka-Fai, Yau Nai-Hoi, Wong King-Fai
Cast: Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin, Jordan Chan Siu-Chun, Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi, Hui Siu-Hung, Lam Suet, Lam Kau, Bonnie Wong Man-Wai, Raymond Wong Ho-Yin, Wong Wah-Ho
The Skinny: Frenetic medical satire has pretty actors and funny stuff all over the place, but to what end nobody truly knows. It's better than a Wong Jing movie, but that's not saying that much. Johnnie To may have been having an off day.
 
Review
by Kozo:

Off-the-wall satire from those Milkyway fellas proves to be their most flawed work since Where a Good Man Goes. White-hot Cecilia Cheung is Yan, a neophyte doctor working at Ho Ka-Kui General Hospital. As you’d expect, she’s one of the idealistic types, hoping to make a difference and help people. Sadly, that’s not the case at this hospital, where the higher ups (a strange group of seven guys who hide in the dark) make the budget their primary concern. Their instruction: keep everything cheap, even if it means letting people die.

As if that weren’t dark enough, the doctors and nurses are lazy, self-important, and care nothing for the patients. They’re more interested in lunch breaks and shift changes than anything else. One of them is Jim (Jordan Chan), who actually operated on Yan when she was only a fourteen year-old. Back then Jim and his co-hort Joe (Ekin Cheng) worked extra hard to hide Yan’s appendectomy scar so she could wear a bikini someday.

As if that weren’t silly-sounding enough, Yan was so touched by their zeal and enthusiasm that she became a doctor AND made a promise to herself to marry one of the two someday. Meanwhile, Jim decides to rededicate himself but he can’t do it alone. He and Yan turn to Joe, who’s now an auto-mechanic who works feverishly on cars in an auto body shop that looks suspiciously like an emergency room. He even has his assistants wiping sweat from his brow when he’s hunched over an engine. And that’s just the beginning of the silliness, as we witness toilet cleaning, quintuplets, chainsaws, talking cars, rainstorms, lovestruck beggars, and multiple attacks by lightning - all in the name of medical satire.

This hospital comedy is incredibly frenetic even by HK standards. Jokes and body parts fly fast and furious, and To and Wai never stop to explore the maudlin - even with life and death surrounding everything. Given that, the movie can be seen as a total waste, but To and Wai manage to inject a healthy dose of creativity into the proceedings. Unfortunately, that creativity does little more than throw as many jokes out there that they possibly can. The result, while not as trying or idiotic as a Wong Jing feature, comes off as uneven and muddled. The film certainly is funny, but no payoff truly exists.

On the plus side, the leads turn in fun performances, especially usual co-conspirators Ekin Cheng and Jordan Chan, who finally manage to team up on a movie that doesn’t involve triads or hi-tech spy espionage. This may not be a movie for the people expecting more Milkywaycrime films, but it has creativity, cinematic flair, and effective star turns, which isn't bad for a Hong Kong movie. It's just below the mark for a Milkyway film. (Kozo 2000)

 
Availability: DVD (Hong Kong)
Region 0 NTSC
Mei Ah Entertainment
16x9 Anamorphic Widescreen
Cantonese and Mandarin Language Tracks
Dolby Digital 5.1 / DTS 5.1
Removable English and Chinese Subtitles
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image courtesy of www.chinastar.com

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