Yi gai yun tian

Not having heard about the 1986 movie "A Hearty Response" (aka "Yi gai yun tian") prior to getting a chance to sit down and watch it in 2020, I didn't really knew what to expect from the movie. Granted, my admiration and love for the Hong Kong cinema was more than sufficient to persuade me to sit down and watch this movie from writer Man-Cheuk Lai and director Norman Law Man.

While the storyline told in this movie was very generic and archetypical for a Hong Kong movie from the mid-1980s, I was having problems getting submerged fully into the storyline. It just seemed too chaotic and random, and it didn't really feel wholeheartedly.

The characters in the movie weren't really fully fleshed out, so they seemed rather rigid and sort of shallow, despite of having an interesting enough cast ensemble to perform the various characters and roles in the movie. And this was by no means a particularly outstanding moment in the career of Yun-Fat Chow.

"A Hearty Response" was just something of a swing and a miss for me. Sure, the movie is watchable, but it was hardly an outstanding or memorable movie experience. And I can honestly say, that while I endured the movie to the very end, this is definitely not a movie that I will be watching a second time around.

My rating of "A Hearty Response" is a mere four out of ten stars. There are far better movies from the mid-1980s that made it out of the Hong Kong cinema.