A Hearty Response

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.

This is a Hong Kong action comedy pairing Chow Yun Fat and Liu Fong together as two cops, Bon and Yan. After a botched attempt to nab a drug smuggler, they end up helping illegal resident Kwong Sun (Joey Wang), who was caught in the middle of the heist. Sun fakes amnesia in order to protect her illegal identity and is put-up for several nights by Bon. However, Sun can only fake her amnesia for so long and Bon is still assigned to jab the smuggler.

It is a fast-paced police story with some touching chemistry between Chow Yun Fat and Joey Wang, and Fat and Liu Fong make a hilarious police duo - mismatched yet full of rapport. While there is plenty of humor, there are also some intense action scenes, especially involving the drug smuggler (Wai Shum) - scenes that may not be suitable for the younger ones. And, there is also some touching drama, particularly involving how Bon helps Sun.

Overall, it's a good Hong Kong action comedy that is fine for young adults and older. The younger crowd might need parental supervision.

Grade B+

During their last (botched) operation, Hong Kong cops Chow Yun-Fat and Lui Fong accidentally cause the slight head injury of a pretty young woman. Because she has entered the country illegally, and has no other place to live, she pretends that she has amnesia and that she thinks Yun-Fat is her husband. He feels guilty about her "condition", so he lets her stay in his house. But there is someone from her past stalking her, with bad intentions...

"A Hearty Response" is a film that could only have been made in Hong Kong. Is there any other country that would even attempt to combine pleasant (and often funny) slapstick comedy, sweet romance, heartfelt melodrama, wild/crazy/furious action and sleazy, misogynistic violence in one film? Is there any other film that contains both brutal rape and a scene in which a boy urinates into the mouth of a man pretending to be unconscious? Chow Yun-Fat fans should certainly not expect anything like "The Killer" here. If you can live with that, I would recommend this picture, but with serious reservations, as its schizophrenic nature makes it not for all tastes. (**1/2)