I had high hope for this movie, with Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro as leading actors and Kar-wai Wang as writers and producers (with bonus cast like Eason Chan, though I did cringe when I saw Angelababy was in it), but this movie is just not as good as it could be.
It's not all bad, of course. The dialogues, esp. the monologues by Tony Leung, are very much what you'd expect from Kar-wai Wang. And the visual was superb (for which this movie won the visual effect award of HK film awards)--like many other WKW movies.
The thing is , a good movie is more than good dialogues and visual effects. I have fewer problems with the plot than the story-telling. (Compared to other WKW movies, this movie actually has more plot and less self- reflection?) The exaggeration was a bit too much for me. The movie swings from a serious tone to a comic tone all the time and that stopped me from getting emotionally participating with the movie while watching it. The thing is, while in my opinion most of the WKW movies happen in a sort of vacuum world that's not quite the world we live in but not that far off, this movie went a bit too far as I cannot connect with the world the characters live in (things like a pub game that was so over-the-top it was like a boxing game, and live a life like a monk just to make a good...uh...pizza(or whatever it is but pizza probably is the equivalent thing in western culture)).
As for the acting, Tony Leung was good, though he's played this kind of characters for so many times this is nothing but old news; Takeshi Kaneshiro surprisingly let go of himself in this, though I'm still not so sure that's a good thing; Angelababy, the de facto female lead in the movie, gave her usual performance, which is not something to brag about. If this is a rom-com, I probably wouldn't notice her bland performance, but with most of her scenes acting alongside Tony Leung, it was achingly obvious.(Though she does look like some girl who would be so single-minded in romance, so I suppose it was not all bad casting?)
It's not all bad, of course. The dialogues, esp. the monologues by Tony Leung, are very much what you'd expect from Kar-wai Wang. And the visual was superb (for which this movie won the visual effect award of HK film awards)--like many other WKW movies.
The thing is , a good movie is more than good dialogues and visual effects. I have fewer problems with the plot than the story-telling. (Compared to other WKW movies, this movie actually has more plot and less self- reflection?) The exaggeration was a bit too much for me. The movie swings from a serious tone to a comic tone all the time and that stopped me from getting emotionally participating with the movie while watching it. The thing is, while in my opinion most of the WKW movies happen in a sort of vacuum world that's not quite the world we live in but not that far off, this movie went a bit too far as I cannot connect with the world the characters live in (things like a pub game that was so over-the-top it was like a boxing game, and live a life like a monk just to make a good...uh...pizza(or whatever it is but pizza probably is the equivalent thing in western culture)).
As for the acting, Tony Leung was good, though he's played this kind of characters for so many times this is nothing but old news; Takeshi Kaneshiro surprisingly let go of himself in this, though I'm still not so sure that's a good thing; Angelababy, the de facto female lead in the movie, gave her usual performance, which is not something to brag about. If this is a rom-com, I probably wouldn't notice her bland performance, but with most of her scenes acting alongside Tony Leung, it was achingly obvious.(Though she does look like some girl who would be so single-minded in romance, so I suppose it was not all bad casting?)