Well, sure I hadn't even heard about the 2018 movie titled "A Cool Fish" (aka "Wu ming zhi bei") prior to sitting down in 2021 to watch it. But with it being a Chinese movie that I hadn't already seen, I needed no persuasion to sit down to watch it.
And while "A Cool Fish" was watchable, it was by no means an outstanding movie. For me, the storyline was just too much of a scrambled and random mess, so I don't really grasp what writers Zhilong Lei and Xiaozhi Rao were trying to accomplish with the different storylines that they tried to tie together for a unified movie. It just felt out of sync with each other.
I will say, though, that the acting in the movie was good, despite of the storyline being such a scrambled mess. But the acting performances were definitely good throughout the course of the story, and I was in particularly impressed with actress Suxi Ren and her performance, especially since she virtually had no body language to use in her acting, given her role in the movie.
While I managed to sit through the entire course of the movie, I must admit that I was starting to drift off once or twice along the way. For me the movie was just not really delivering a wholehearted and coherent storyline. So I am not giving any praise to director Xiaozhi Rao for this 2018 movie.
My rating of "A Cool Fish" lands on a four out of ten stars. If you enjoy Chinese cinema, this is hardly a noteworthy movie, nor is it one that I will recommend that you rush out to watch. "A Cool Fish" was good enough for a single viewing, albeit not an overly impressive viewing, but it is hardly a movie that warrants more than just a single viewing.
