One thing which draws me to contemporary PRC cinema is that on average, their films (at least the ones good enough to get overseas screenings) tend to be more grounded, more cynical and more interested in the workings of a society than the comparable Western film of a corresponding genre.
Here, this comparison is not so clear-cut - because the premise strongly (if unintentionally - the movies were released within 3 months of each other) echoes Josh Margolin's Thelma, which was also both a comedy about a scam and a film with a lot of amusing yet meaningful comments on its society. Relative to Thelma, it is actually Honey Money Phony which is more beholden to classic crime comedy tropes over social realism.
Quite often, it takes shortcuts in an attempt to score easy laugh lines - i.e. The classic metaphor of scammers as wolves and their prey as the sheep is reinforced with the SFX of howling and bleating played whenever the predator and the "unwitting" mark try their best. The humour in a scene with a gap-toothed character who sprays so much saliva a small dog in the room ends up drenched by the time he is done talking is rather beneath what I have come to expect from a PRC film.
At the same time, this is STILL a modern PRC film, so the social realist DNA is not absent, and the story can still be quite acidic when it counts. For instance, Lin has a properly realized backstory explaining how she had come to be in such a situation - including an ignored report of sexual harassment causing her to move to "Koo Aang" (renamed Macao) in the first place. The male scammer's backstory is surprisingly downbeat for the genre - not "dark" in the edgy sense, but simply a disappointingly plausible tale of parental neglect.
The film can also be vaguely compared to Now You See Me, in the sense that both involve scamming a single unsympathetic guy out of a lot of money, albeit by very different methods. The parallel becomes intentional when it also involves a scene with love locks on a bridge - but while the idea was played completely straight in Now You See Me, here Lin and her friend ask the male lead Ooyang and his uncle for help in lockpicking AWAY the love locks they left during the past relationships turned sour. It comes across as a very intentional counterpoint - and the cynicism is highlighted further when a photo vendor snaps the two leads and offers a locket with their photo. In response to their denials, he simply assumes they are adulterous and proposes a shielded locket with the photo hidden beneath a sliding cover.
I haven't spoken much about the core of the story, which is a classic crime comedy, but it's basically fine. Certainly more than a little predictable and overlong at times, but it still got more than enough laughs out of me. It helps that it invests attention to detail like the actual workings of bank transactions which lesser works often miss. The characters are all fun enough to follow and the epilogue thankfully does not forget about any one of them.
All in all, looking at it rationally this is probably the weakest and least substantial year 2024 PRC film I saw - but it still made me laugh a lot, and remains one of the better films I saw from that year.
