This movie was such a bitter pill to swallow. But I am getting ahead of myself here.
When I stumbled upon this 2014 crime comedy movie in 2021, I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch it. This was a Chinese movie that I hadn't already seen, and that fact alone is sufficient to make me watch it. But to sweeten the deal, then "Dou maa gei" (aka "Horseplay") had the likes of Ekin Chen, Kelly Chen, Eric Tsang and Tony Ka Fai Leung on the cast list. So what was there not to like?
Well, let's just start with the fact that the storyline told in "Horseplay", as written by writer and director Chi-Ngai Lee, just utterly fell short of entertaining me. The movie was all over the place, and never took the time to delve deep into something, so it felt like a rushed and superficial experience. And little did it help that the characters in the movie were about as interesting as a sheet of blank paper.
Wow, talk about having characters that had the appeal of cardboard cut-outs. It was just astounding how writer and director Chi-Ngai Lee could manage to come up with an entire gallery of characters without any appeal, without any real distinguishable characteristics or traits, and come up with something that just fell so short of delivering anything of any worth.
And despite the fact of having some pretty established Hong Kong performers on the cast list, then "Horseplay" was just a massive swing and a miss. Not even the likes of aforementioned performers above could manage to do much of anything with this movie, as they lacked a proper script and proper characters.
I managed to endure about an hour of "Horseplay", and then I just threw the towel in the ring and gave up. The movie failed to entertain me on many levels. And let me just be the first to say that this movie is not one that I will be returning to finish, ever. Nor is it a movie that I would recommend to fans of the Asian cinema to rush out to get their hands on.
My rating of "Horseplay" lands on a mere three out of ten stars.
