User reviews

Clifton Ko, known for his lighthearted and feel-good movies, directs this one with Raymond Wong, who plays a junior clerk at a construction company. He lives under the care of his uncle and his cousin, Ping (Pauline Yeung). However, his simple life goes astray when he comes across an old billionaire who teaches him the secret to becoming rich.

Not bad acting from the cast of characters and this film gives a lesson that being rich does not mean everything will be hunky dory in the world and that it doesn't guarantee your life will be smooth and full of happiness. However, the film misses the mark on the comedy, which this film is supposed to contain, and the overall pacing is pretty slow. It won't hurt to give this film a look, but there are better than this.

Grade C-

When the father of a young provincial man, Wong Sheung, played by Raymond Wong, must sell his home and business, Wong Sheung moves to Hong Kong to seek a fortune that will enable him to purchase a new home for his parent, and there a cousin arranges employment for him as a clerk with a large construction firm where he promptly becomes enamoured of the corporation president's daughter Jenny (Olivia Cheng), and also places him in living quarters shared with a pretty young crippled woman, Ping (Pauline Yeung), and Lulu (Elizabeth Lee), a free spirit with few moral restraints. Wong Sheung's amorous relationships with these three women form the spine of a jointless plot that also depicts his coming into possession of a diary belonging to a billionaire, immediately before the latter's suicide, a didactic journal that describes a method for achieving great financial success; to wit, through adoption of consistently unscrupulous financial behaviour, a mode that Wong Sheung follows with predictably uneven results. Also titled as "How To Be A Billionaire", the film is over reliant upon physical comedy that offers nothing comic and very little care is taken within the script to combine and develop various plot storyline threads; this flaw, along with shoddy editing, results in a production that lacks most of those elements generally deemed essential for plot coherence, especially logic and continuity. A noteworthy example of such a shortcoming involves the limp of the disabled Ping that is not merely rather varied in its manner but apt to disappear entirely, as when during a foot chase scene, she sprints as a deer. Acting in general is cartoonish with the exception of the always capable Cheng, who actually creates her character, while erratic usage of makeup, unfocused direction, sub par dubbing and synching for the Mandarin language film and, in a subtitled DVD edition, a head scratching English translation all combine in the fabrication of this largely boring and silly movie.