Movie Review: Turning Point 2/Laughing Gor之潛罪犯

It’s no laughing matter; you can tell by their faces.

This was the last film of 2011 for the group of masochists known as the Gang of Film (電影人幫).

Coming off the success of Flying Swords of Dragon Gate/ 龍門飛甲, we were looking forward to this film, if somewhat ambivalently. We had seen and (mostly) enjoyed the first Laughing Gor film, and while we weren’t expecting cinematic gold, we figured the film would still entertain.

I love Herman Yau. He can make movies better than they ought to be. He saved a lot of recent films from being much worse than they should have been.

Laughing Gor 2/Laughing Gor之潛罪犯 has Kate Tsui and Janice Man.

I’d like to be the white meat in that love sandwich.

So even if it wasn’t going to be good, I still had something to look at.

Kara Hui/Wai Ying Hung has a small role. Sold.

I know what Liu Kai Chi is thinking.

This film, like its predecessor, is based on TVB’s character of the same name, played by Michael Tse.

There’s no crying in prison. Until you go to the shower room.

The films themselves are a continuation/extension of the TVB program.

So if you haven’t seen the show, sometimes you can’t follow the plot.

Well, that’s not true.

It means that sometimes you are expected to know who some people are without them being introduced or explained. Because its expected that you’ve watched the TVB drama.  

And if you haven’t, well, f@#$ you.

The real reason you can’t follow the plot is because there isn’t one.

Not a coherent one, anyway.

Laughing Gor is in prison to help catch someone who’s not in that prison.

But he is in prison with Chapman To, aka He Who Must Show His @ss In Every Film.

“Do you want to take a shower?”

Laughing is serving time with Francis Ng, a psychiatrist (ologist?) who, although convicted on a major narcotics charge, is still allowed to conduct his practice while serving time, seeing patients in the visitors room.

“Whaddaya mean, tell you about my mother???”

There are Burmese drug dealers, bereaved widows, corrupt cops and politicians (Herman gets points for making a movie that’s China-unfriendly), and footage of Lam Suet eating that’s worse than anything you see in The Untold Story.

You get Kate Tsui enacting emotional trauma as some sort of manifestation of low-function developmental disability. She’s supposed to be in shock, but she just looks autistic. 

I don’t mean that colloquially. I mean she really looks like a low-function autistic person.

See what I mean?

You get Janice Man blabbering about some weird existentialist materialism as an excuse for leaving the police: she hasn’t lived enough yet because she hasn’t been to Japan and gone shopping all over the world.

Looks like someone used  Kate Tsui’s  glass.

The film indulges in a recent and annoying Chinese film phenomenon: someone spouts arcane psychobabble and/or pseudointelligence, dropping obscure or likely fictitious names of supposedly renowned scholars in dialog that could only impress people who have no background in those areas or education in general. 

I.e. not me or any other member of the Gang of Film (電影人幫), all of whom laughed.

The narrative is leaden, uninspired and wholly predictable. The only true shock or surprise of the film comes at the very end, and it is wholly unwelcome.

The ending sequence/montage/whatever-the-hell-you-call-it was well-intentioned but frankly insulting, at least to this American. 

Because you get audio of Martin Luther King saying “I have a dream,” an incredibly cheap and disingenuous plea for credibility that comes at the tail end of a film that should have been titled Laughably Bad.

You know what? I had a dream too.

I had a dream that the last film of 2011, directed by someone I respect and genuinely like, wasn’t going to disappoint, insult, and repel me.  Tough t*tty for me. And the milk was sour.

I’m going on the balcony to have a cigarette.