Had I heard about the 2020 Chinese fantasy movie "The Legend of Mermaid" prior to watching it? Not even remotely. But that was hardly an issue, since I do believe in giving all movies a fair chance. And thus I ended up sitting down to watch "The Legend of Mermaid" here in 2023, as I happened to stumble upon the movie by random chance.
Writer Fan Jiu Wei put together a script and storyline that wasn't particularly compelling. In fact, the storyline was rather weak and erratic in its structure, as it was all over the place and making little narrative sense. And the movie suffered terribly from that. It felt like director Cui Yan-Long was just making things up as the filming progressed.
I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in "The Legend of Mermaid", but I will say that the acting performances were, for the majority of the performers, actually fair enough. I have to say that Shaowu Xu (playing the evil Gao De Hai) was poorly cast, because his performance was rigid and wooden. The chemistry between Vera Qiu (playing Xi Yin the mermaid) and Liang Ting Wei (playing Yan Lie) wasn't all that convincing.
Visually then "The Legend of Mermaid" was a bag of mixed nuts. Some of the special effects and CGI looked good, while others resembled something from a discarded 1990s computer game.
"The Legend of Mermaid" was by no means an overly entertaining movie, and yet I managed to endure all 75 minutes of it. It is not a movie that I would recommend for fans of the Asian cinema, as it was a rather dull, bland and forgettable movie experience. The movie eluded my radar back in 2020 and up to now in 2023, and just as quietly as the movie snuck in under the radar, just as quietly will it fade away and be dissolved in the mists of oblivion. There is not enough contents to the movie to support a second viewing, as it hardly was able to support the first viewing.
My rating of "The Legend of Mermaid" lands a generous four out of ten stars.
