Boring…

Anyone who tells you this is a good movie was on drugs while watching it. Too much CGI, the main protagonists are unlikeable and the movies’ biggest sin? Wasting the amazing actor Kara Wai!

A warning: there will be some big spoilers here, but these will be needed to reveal some details of the movie so you can understand my issues with the movie. It mainly follows this girl played by Jessie Li who could see monsters since she was a child so her mother abandoned her at a mental hospital. I know we are meant to feel sorry for her but I really didn’t care because the actor really couldn’t carry it off. It felt like she was trying to act *gasp!* and lacked authenticity.

And then we have the male lead Shawn Yue as Meng who is a monster hunter. Everybody in the movie calls him rubbish and a second rate hunter and this is true, he really is useless. Near the end of the movie, while still being useless, he loses his left arm so he gets a new one from a side character called Uncle Ping who puts all his power into it. Even with his new arm he still sucks, and only wins his fight against a top hunter because of some dirty tricks and all the while was as graceful as a drunk horse. The final battle was poorly choreographed and there was way too much cgi and shakey cam it was almost impossible to follow.

There is this super crystal that can grant hunters immeasurable strength. Our main male lead gets this crystal and yet is unable to defeat out main big bad played by Kara Wai. Instead, the final battle is ended in 15 seconds as Jessie suddenly pulls a Yugioh and understands the heart of the cards and does one move… hold her hand out and then twist it like Aaron Kwok in his Never Ending Love MV. This defeats Kara somehow without any dramatic build up or awesome final confrontational struggle. Kara just stands and screams and boom done. Lame.

I just hate how they wasted Kara because she is a fantastic actor that just oozes charisma and malice. In this movie she just talks a bit and gets around with loads of cgi around her. It was one really lazy part for her and doesn’t allow her to show off her other acting chops. There is one scene she leans into a sculpture and basically rubs her chest over it during an exposition bit. Was that necessary?

And a massive plothole here is that that super crystal could be absorbed to power up anyone, why didn’t Kara Wai use it to power up? Instead she leaves it floating around her domain… that makes no sense. When Shawn appears in front if her near the end and she says “you have absorbed the power of the crystal?” No shit, what were you expecting to happen by leaving it there?

The best part of the movie? Paper. A character that can origami himself into any shape and is the comedy sidekick to Shawn. But again, it is CGI. The CGI is very good, but it cannot carry a movie that is poorly executed. Avoid this movie

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I won't rewatch this

Jessica Hsuan and Frankie Lam are great in this series. The history of their characters stories is really quite traumatic if I am honest, and Frankie always being the thoughtful mature guy to the really insecure Jessica really grated on my nerves but it all ended ok. However, I refuse to watch it again. Why? One word. Cherry. F*** Cherry. Natalie Tong really made the character this hateful witch I just wanted to strangle, and that ladt scene with poor Vincent... nope. Unforgivable! How was that character written that way ans allowed to win awards? The awards were rigged!

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Great drama, terrible main theme song

I love this drama, always puts a smile on my face.
It’s a shame Linda Chung cannot sing.
It has a fantastic cast and great story that is just fun and gripping from beginning to end.
But Linda Chung really cannot sing.
Bobby Au Yeung is fantastic to watch and Joey Meng is darn beautiful in her role, it just blows my mind.
And yet Linda Chung just really cannot sing at all.
Overall a great drama to watch and great to rewatch, just remember to skip the intro and ending credits because the singing is terrible.
Did I mention Linda Chung cannot sing?
Seriously, who thought she could sing and allowed her to sing so many songs at TVB? She has this low hoarse voice that makes songs sound like they are being wrung out of her throat instead of being sung, and yet somebody at TVB thought “yes, she can sing, make her sing!”
Other than that small black mark, great show! Just stop Linda singing, for the love of God.

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This is a pretty good show but one thing ruins it for me

I’ll admit, I loved the first Big White Duel season, so I was hoping for more awesomeness in this. I suspended my disbelief for some of the miraculous surgeries carried out in this drama by the amazing cast, and I can ignore some of the small plotholes it presents, but one thing I could mot forgive is Natalie Tong. Why does she nearly always play a dumb character in these dramas? I really, really hated her character Cherry in My Unfair Lady and how she treated Vincent Wong I wanted to throw my teacup at my TV, and here she does it again by being an unbelievable idiot that it blows my mind. In the drama it shows she made some past decisions that were extremely childish and selfish, and in the present day while dating Kenneth Ma’s character Dr. Tong Ming, she again makes stupid decisions that lead to her misfortune - her own fault - and she decides to just be friends with Tong Ming. Like wtf? This show should he an 8 or 9, but her character pulls it down to a 7.

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Anthology of 3 short movies, 2 of which disappoint

This movie is an anthology of 3 short movies. The first is called The Chink that talks about a pop star who moves into a new apartment as a secret love nest for her and her boyfriend slash manager. The second is called In The Mall following a KOL live streaming while walking around. The third and last movie is called The Tenement dealing with a rain soaked mysterious woman blocking the way for the residents of an apartment block.

The first two short movies are terrible and boring af, I did not care what was happening to the characters because they were all huge a**holes and deserved what they got. This is a shame because the second movie had Jerry Lamb in it, and I do enjoy watching him act but he was so unlikeable here.

Now, the last movie is the best of the bunch as it has a group of apartment block strangers working together to deal with this strange wet figure blocking the stairway that seems to be kill anybody trying to leave the block. This movie had Richie Ren in it and it was so great to see him in a cantonese acting role doing his best to speak canto, and most of the funny and scariest moments were here as well, but sadly the ending was too abrupt due to the time constraints of the anthology.

The first two movies were so bad that I cannot rate them because it would just be a zero, but the 3rd short movie on its own pulls this up to a 6. If the third movie was able to become its own feature, this score could have been higher, but the bad aftertaste of the first 2 dragged it down.

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What drugs were they taking to make this?

Man, as I have seen the previous Flying Tiger I knew what to expect from this formulaic series, but I was not prepared for the new depths of suspended disbelief I had to sit through. Many big TVB names are here like Kenneth Ma and Michael Miu, and my favourite wonky canto actor Michael Wong was in it as well speaking in his unique way, but this is all ruined by the inclusion of Lee Pace. Don't mistaken me, Lee is a great actor and has done amazing stuff, but h is completely wasted here in this series. Some scenes with him had me go "what the fish?" because it made no sense, like throwing a can of... I think shaving cream... into a microwave, which destroys a house. That had me laughing so hard! And when Lee Pace's character sees his parents die, the shots to show how sad he was was done so poorly I had to shake my head, and I never do that, and he gets over his parents death so quickly I got massive whiplash. Also, talking about his parents, the terrorists of the drama held his parents hostage so that Lee's character would comply to their demands, but before Lee could carry out any instructions the terrorists kill them anyway, losing any leverage they had on him, and yet he continued to follow their instructions. What sort of writing is that? Man, there is suspension of disbelief, but here you need to be suspended by a cliff to follow this properly.

On the bright side, great soundtrack.

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Not as good as part 1, but still a fun movie to watch

Ah it is great to see another movie with Janice Man in it being all pretty while also authoritative, loved seeing her back in this movie. What lowered the score of part 2 for me was that it missed Donnie Yen, and that was a crying shame due to how awesome he was in part 1. What also brought down the score was how rushed everything felt in part 2 as well. They should have made it into a trilogy to better pace the story of each arc. However, this is offset but the fact that the canto voice actor for Zhou Zhi Ruo finally stopped sucking on helium and actually adds depth to her voice acting thanks to the evil turn of the character. That was a massive relief for me as I watched this flick.

The final boss of this movie is Cheng Kun, which made sense if you followed the both parts and watched how he sneakily manipulated his way to power, but man the fight at the end could have been done a little better. There is more CG this time around as well, which appeared a little off at times but never to the point where it distracted too much from the main story. A good movie and rewatchable.

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I loved this movie

I watched this in Cantonese because if I was gonna enjoy this movie, it was going to be in Canto! Comparisons to the original Jet Li movie is unavoidable, but this movie is - in my opinion - entertaining af. Seeing Louis Koo in ancient chinese outfits was a great throwback to his TVB days, and Donnie Yen as the awesome Zhang San Feng was great as well as we rarely see Donnie as an old and invincible martial artist. I don't know why people are complaining about Raymond Lam being too old for the role, the film makes it very clear his character is in his thirties, and Raymond easily passes for someone in his thirties. Sure it does't follow the books 100%, but this is a movie and not a TV drama, therefore some liberties had to be taken.

Although I had fun watching this film, what annoyed me the most was the canto voice actor for Zhou Zhi Ruo. Hot dang, was she sucking on helium or something, I really hated the voice acting on her. On the opposite end, I was enamored by the actress Janice Man as Zhao Min, she is a fierce looking beauty that had me enjoying the scenes she had as she shared them with Raymond Lam. Her voice actor also did a great job as well, providing authority in her voice.

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What a pile of crap

The only redeeming feature of this movie is Philip Keung in the third story, but even then the story is really weak and the only scary thing was the terrible script Philip was given to work with. He did his best but it was as immersive as a dirty toilet bowl.

The first story involved two friends, one who wanted to be a screenwriter and one who wanted to be a director. They go to a special props shed with many preserved animals, where the scriptwriter writes this amazing serial murder script and wants to be the director of the movie. The aspiring director gets upset at this and claims the screenwriter was being selfish, there is a scuffle, and the screenwriter predictably dies. Aspiring director guy panics and, predictably, he put the screenwriter’s body into a suitcase and pours formaldehyde all over him to preserve the body. The director guy later is able to make the movie using his friends script but then oh no, the cops ask him questions about his missing screenwriter buddy. He claims he hasn’t seen his friend in months and realises the cops are gonna find the location where he killed his friend so decides to go back to burn the place down. This is when - somehow - he discovers his screenwriter buddy had murdered 3 people in different ways as inspiration for his script and had the bodies hidden around the prop shed, which he somehow also discovers. Plot twist, the screenwriter wanted to be the director because he knew it would be the first and last film he would make as he would be arrested soon after it. Oh no, I don’t care.

The story was boring and the deaths were all so crap and had no stakes at all so I didn’t care what happened to anybody. I didn’t even care about the two male leads because they were so unlikeable as well. My biggest issue with this story is that a few months have passed already since all the murders, but when the director guy finds the bodies they are all still fresh and not rotting at all. Do you think corpses stay fresh for months and not rot when stored in the Hong Kong heat? I don’t care how much cling film you use and formaldehyde you use, no body can look that fresh for that long. Also, won’t some dude who doesn’t work as an undertaker be refused purchasing of large quantities of formaldehyde? I am sure you need a lot for 4 cadavers. And also that suitcase where the screenwriter was thrown into must have been made using some legendary material because it was clearly a cloth-like material suitcase and yet none of the formaldehyde leaked out, not even through the zipper gaps. They should have gotten a suitcase sponsorship to promote how great the waterproofing was inside and outside.

The 2nd movie was a slightly better story about 2 girls as aspiring screenwriters (see a trend here?) and the younger girl copying some of the ideas of the older girl to write a great screenplay. The older girl was slightly upset about it, but ultimately let it go. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the younger girl goes missing and the older girl starts seeing the younger girl and thinks she’s a ghost. Oh no! We find out later the younger girl got into a taxi and the taxi driver murdered her because… I dunno. The older girl was hypnotised to try and bring back any useful information about what could have happened to the younger girl. The taxi guy just so happened to work at the same studio as the older girl so he tried to silence her. Suddenly, as the older girl was riding in his taxi and realised the taxi man was likely the murderer, the cops arrive and arrest him. Older girl’s colleague appears and says “yeah I totally suspected him so I called the cops.”

My biggest issue with the 2nd story is that we do not get given any context into why the taxi driver killed the younger girl. We do not truly understand his motivation, the story just goes “oh she died he killed her” and that’s it. We get one scene where taxi man talks to his wife and his wife shouts at him for a variety of things, as if it was trying to imply he was looking for a way to release his pent up anger but it wasn’t enough and I wasn’t convinced. And the “ghost” situations were all in the older girls mind as a result of hypnotism. That was lame.

The third story is the best of the bunch but that’s not saying much, that’s like saying the diahrrea I did today was better than the diahrrea I did yesterday. This is the story that has Philip Keung, who wakes up on a wet floor with temporary amnesia. As he runs around this warehouse he keeps seeing ghostly figures appearing and disappearing around him. Eventually he meets a woman and starts talking to her as if he was very familiar with her but she won’t follow him as he is trying to make her leave with him due to the ghosts that were there. She eventually goes with him and in a room where he saw a ghost there was no ghost there, so she tries to leave and kicks Philip in the balls using a very fake and terribly unconvincing manner. Later we discover Philip was a triad boss and his wife wanted to leave him, so he killed his wife and poured acid all over her body so she wouldn’t leave him, and then be became a vagrant out of guilt. Later some guys drugged him and his friend and took them to a warehouse to conduct illegal experiments as a way to cure this disfigured and ill woman at the behest of some guy. Philip woke up and killed a lot of the people at the warehouse out of anger and passed out due to being injected with something during one of the scuffles. All the ghost stuff and the woman he was talking to were all in his head as he was recovering from the injection. He catches up to the disfigured woman and is about to lill her when all of a sudden someone smacks him at the back of the head and kills him and the story ends.

Story 3 was a confusing mess and what illegal experiments were being conducted to fix what ailment of the woman? Nothing is explained. The story started off pretty good as Philip was dealing with possible supernatural stuff, but it immediately fell in quality the moment the woman - as his hallucinated wife - kicked him between the legs. It was poorly edited and looked incredibly fake that it took me out of the immersion immediately and the rest of the story just fell apart.

Avoid this mess of a movie.

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I really wanted to like this drama

I really wanted to like this drama but sorry, it is just terrible. Charlene Choi plays JD, a forensic scientist who is great at her job but is completely socially awkward, similar to Temperence Brennan from the US TV series bones, but lacks her sex appeal. The story mixed her into some random stuff that made no sense; it is so contrived I actually felt my head spin.

The male lead is played by Jospeh Chang and he is definitely not a Seeley Booth, in fact he is a hot headed idiot who barely gets anything done right. The two mains have no chemistry at all so I didn’t care what happened between them. Watching Joseph constantly use mandarin to speak to the guys who ALL use canto got really obnoxious because he had no charm to him at all, he is just this hot headed bull that does stupid stuff and occasionally throws bad canto phrases at people. To be honest, I only watched this to the end because of Law Kar Ying, Kenny Wong and Michael Tao, legendary TVB actors. Everybody else was meh.

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What the heck is this?

After watching two incredible dramas with Kenneth Ma this year I thought TVB were only going to get better, but instead we get this abomination. Ruco Chan really is unlucky, the first drama with him as lead this year is a pile of manure and that breaks my heart. I really like Ruco and I really want him to be in an awesome, likeable role, but here his acting is just mediocre. It is not his fault as we've all seen him be awesome, but the role he was given is just... meh.

Besides from him, the other main characters are just annoying. Mandy Wong here plays a pretty pitiful role, but her being this huge pushover just had me so angry because her meekness goes from pitiful to just pathetic. Roxanne Tong has a main role as a cop here, but she is so irritating to watch because her acting is awful and she has no chemistry at all with any of the other characters of the show. She just spends the entire time failing as a cop and following Ruco Chan like a leech because of her hunches with little reason to do so. Kenneth Ma needs to show her how its done, man.

One thing that also did not fail to get my blood boiling is Angelina Lo. Every single role I see her in gets me mad because she aways plays the same whiney, moany annoying f'ing old woman that is so unlikeable it makes me want to throw my phone at the TV. She has been typecast into the rich annoying old woman role and I get it, she is really good at it, but whenever I hear her voice or see her on the TV I automatically brace myself for the inevitable wave of anger to crash over me like a tidal wave of diarrhoea.

The best part of the entire drama is Hugo Ng as this massive a'hole father to Mandy Wong's character, who just got out of prison after 30 years. He is allowed to let loose and overact to his heart's content, just eating up every single scene he is in by being the rowdy and unpredictable villain and it is just joyous to watch him in action. If this drama did not have him in it it would not even be worth watching. I am watching this purely for Hugo, more crazy Hugo please!!

EDIT: my goodness, I really want Angelina Lo and Roxanne Tong to just stop acting in this drama already. If they die I will celebrate, damn they are both as annoying as each other.

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The CGI is pretty good but this drama is so full of things that annoyed me.

It started off pretty well and gave us enough exposition to explain the current situation, but suddenly stuff goes sideways and we see how inept and pathetic the Republic of Korea Armed Forces were. They are so undermanned that they had to rope in 3rd year High School students to help fill in the numbers.

Now these kids.... they make some really stupid decisions that had me asking if any group of rational people would make the same decisions they did. And some scenes made no sense, like in one scene they were stuck in a garage and the danger was coming in through the roof but the car keys were stuck behind a cabinet. They made it very clear it would be in any moment and yet found 10 minutes to draw lots to determine who would be bait and lure it away so somebody could try to grab the keys... the same amount of time they could have easily moved the cabinet and grabbed the keys! That is just one of many idiotic moments that had me cursing at my TV.

Best moment is the huge sacrifice at the end. Really emotional and was a great way to end part 1.

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An okay drama that’s just mid

Everything about this drama is just mid. Average. Okay. There is nothing outstanding about it, it spends most of the time just cruising along as medium speed and medium pace with hardly any strong emotional investment in any of the characters. Wayne Lai is completely wasted here as the character he plays is completely two-dimensional as this nice guy ex-stuntman and this does not change even 21 episodes in, and I know it will not change due to the pacing and story beats happening. The only character worth watching is again with the awesome Rebecca Zhu as this strange wildcard of a person who suddenly returns home. Despite her past being the most interesting, it is barely touched upon, again wasting a huge opportunity. I really wanted to like this drama because Brian Chu gets to be a lead character and I do thoroughly like his acting such as in Al Cappacino, but here he is like a plank of wood with rarely any facial emotions outside of his typical thousand yard stare. Overall, this is not a bad drama, but it’s nothing exceptional either, it is just average and that is a huge shame.

Update: I just completed watching this series today and well… it is still pretty average. There were some touching moments, but overall it doesn’t shift my rating. What I found hilarious at the end was the romance between Brian Chu and Rebecca Zhu’s characters. Brian just suddenly blurts out “Hey, let’s be together” but he doesn’t love her and she just brushes it off. This made sense as they both has no romantic moments together in the drama. But, suddenly, in the final episode in a flash forward to the future scene for 1 minute we see the implication that they are together without the show outright stating it. Yes, it is really cheap for not showing us them getting to the romance stage, but at least I can say it is a better love story then Twilight. Literally.

You know, the entire show kept asking if 輕功 was an actual thing, and we see some implications that 輕功 does indeed exist, but I think the show missed out on an opportunity here. If 輕功 was real in the world of the drama, surely 氣功 is real, and if 氣功 is real then surely 九陽神功 is real, and if 九陽神功 is real…

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An average drama with a seriously annoying male lead

I do love a drama about gods and demons and so on. At first glance this appeared to tick the boxes, but then it fell into the predictable cliches TVB employs.

I usually find Brian Tse pretty bland to watch, almost like wallpaper paste or window dressing that is just a white veil. Nothing offensive but nothing outstanding, he is just there. However, this is a perfect match for his role as an immortal because the expected mannerisms of Lu Dong Bin just somehow compliments his acting method tremendously well. I found myself quite enjoying him in this role and I never thought I would say that. Predictably, the moment he was introduced with all his magical powers, TVB had to take them away so that the drama could last 20 episodes instead of being sorted in a single one, but the way he loses his powers was by his beard getting set on fire. That made no sense, why would his magical powers be tied to his beard? That’s like working out and getting all these muscles but one day losing your physique because somebody shaved your pubic hair.

Erica Chan is okay. So far - 7 episodes in - I do not have any lasting impression of her. The actress can be pretty good as she was one of the standout female characters of that TCM drama, but here she is just… there. I don’t hate her character but I feel like she lack the main female lead charisma needed to carry the show.

And then we have the most annoying character in the show played by Danny Hung. Man, he is a swindler here but he spends most of it constantly acting like a brash childish idiot screaming at Brian Tse the entire time. Brian has amazing patience as he accepts being shouted at but I just found myself hating Danny the more I watched the drama. It is not really Danny’s acting since he was great in the TCM drama, it was just that his role was so poorly written. He has two modes so far: throwing himself into a jealous outburst whenever anybody even comes close to Erica, or acting all high and noble as everybody thinks his is an immortal. His character was also written so stupidly, because he backstory was that he really believed in Lu Dong Bin as a child, but one day people came over to his house demanding his grandfather paid his debt due to his grandfather’s gambling habit. He prayed to Lu Dong Bin for help but Lu never came, and so he doesn’t believe in the gods and uses it to swindle people. Like his grandfather brought it on himself, how could he blame it on the gods? He should have blamed his grandfather for gambling with no abandon.

In any case, let’s see how this progresses. I never thought Brian Tse would be this dramas’ saving grace but there you go.

Update: yet another filler drama from TVB that just disappoints. We get the demon as I was hoping for but unfortunately it was introduced too late to really matter. So a “hidden treasure map” is introduced mid-way into the drama, leading to Danny discovering the map to it and finding a magical hairpin. Yes, of all things, it is a magical hairpin stuck inside a rock face. Danny removes it and discovers he can do magical feats with it, but at the cost of his health every time he uses it. It turns out that Brian’s godly Lu Dong Bin fought a demonic Pangolin that had 1000 years of magical training so was highly formidable so was unable to beat it. To help him, Erica - who was then a fairy - stole the Queen Mother of the West’s hairpin in order to give it to Brian and aid him in his fight against the Pangolin. The Queen Mother discovers this and was very upset about this not because she stole the hairpin, but because Erica fell in love with Brian (oh no) so she is punished to suffer 10 cycles of life to let go of her love. Meanwhile, Brian managed to defeat the Pangolin with the hairpin because of all the moisturiser that rubbed off on it from the Queen Mother’s head, but not enough to kill it completely but only seal him within the mountain as long as the L’Oreal hairpin stayed in there.

Danny was an annoying anus all the way until the end. He does something really heroic at the end despite learning it would likely kill him and he ends up in heaven facing the King of Heaven, but he spends the entire time disrespecting someone this important, but the King Of Heaven is really easygoing. The King of Heaven later offers Danny the chance to study and train to become a god, but Danny declines it (wtf?) The final episodes forces Danny and Erica together and I feel that it was undeserved because for 19 episodes Erica was pining after Brian, who as a god could not reciprocate her feelings. Then, out of the blue, Erica suddenly cares about Danny and then boom, they get together. No. It was totally unearned.

Again, Brian is the only redeeming feature of this drama. I liked his acting here but it is not enough for me to rewatch this in the future. Just Danny’s character in this was enough for me to never touch this again.

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This has Wong Jing's trademarks all over it

TVB: What should we do for a TV drama?
Wong Jing: Hear me out. It's the 90s, there is this night club where the girls there sell their bodies for cash but they are not called prostitutes, we can't call them that. Then we have some goldfish there that men can only look at and not touch, but later they get touched, then we have this girl sell her virginity because that's what horny men wanna see. Add in a few triads and drugs and cops, this will be a hit!
TVB: Dude...
WJ: I'm bringing back Monica Chan
TVB: F yeah! I'm in!
WJ: And we'll play all the popular HK cantopop songs from the 80s and 90s!
TVB: Whoa... what about licence fees...
WJ: I know the owners, I'll call in some favours
TVB: Dude! This is gonna be a hit!

Update: ending sucks

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