“Love is a Many Stupid Thing” is an archetypal Wong Jing movie. It is as Wong Jingy as it can be and partakes fully of Wong Jingness. This is not solely because Wong wrote, directed, produced and acted in it, nor only that it full of his trademark images, sequences, bouncy women and horny men. The slapdash, probably unrehearsed acting, an unending steam of comments on other films and filmmakers and constant references to popular culture are the hallmarks of this super-successful movie mogul.

He is willing to beat a joke to death, disinter its rotting corpse and kill it again. When one of the police officers decides to shoot it out with some bad guys he is asked if he would like a John Woo sequence or a Johnny To sequence. He picks Woo, so the doves begin to fly immediately. He has a pistol in each hand and while spinning and then jumping while firing away several of the birds flop to the ground having been shot. A dumb joke that one can see coming while it is developing but that still works perfectly—it was a very funny scene.

Much of the imagery is taken directly from “Infernal Affairs”, including the meetings on the roof of an office building, the death of the undercover cop’s only contact with the department and the secret but overheard meetings in a cinema. The paranoia, isolation and feelings of terror that afflict both the police spy and the Triad spy are played for laughs with Ray, Crazy Tom and Chubby infiltrating the lamest gang in Hong Kong and becoming the only three gangsters that the ridiculous Sam can find. Watson, the Triad mole, is constantly distracted by lascivious policewomen who find him irresistible.

There are a number of reasons to watch “Love is a Many Stupid Thing”. One is the scene in which Stanley Fung hooks up the amorous trio of Chapman To, Lam Tze-Chung and Shawn Yu Man-Lok to a lie detector to discover if their intentions toward the policewomen under his command are honorable. If one of them lies when answering questions like “do you go to prostitutes” the other two receive shocks from electrodes fastened to their heads, faces and groins. Shades of Stanly Milgram, the intensity of the shocks increased with each wrong answer until one of the policewomen knocks Fung out with a rolling pin. This seamlessly connects with the arrival of three gangsters who have a dart gun. The darts are loaded with “8 ½” and are guaranteed to put someone in a coma after he takes eight and one-half steps when hit with one of them. The corrupt police officer, played by Wong Jing, who sells the darts, says the he named it in honor of his favorite film director, Fellini—although the subtitle reads something like “Fellinini”. This extended sequence is hilarious, madcap movie making at its lowest common denominator (with a wink toward high culture) best.

It leads to another incentive for the patient viewer, several lingering shots of Belinda Hamnett in an all but transparent wet white shirt. This scene, along with the costume choices for Teresa Mak—some extremely tight, button straining blouses and, in one case, white lingerie, her dress having been ripped off while jumping from a building, are what one expects from Wong Jing but no still no less welcome. The sequence in which a bath in an expired beauty product shrinks Eric Tsang into a tiny ball—it also shrinks the bunny suit he is wearing—and he bounces into the night, frantically pursued by Candace Yu is funnier than I make it seem by describing it.

It is hard to tell if there was a script as such for this movie—Wong is credited as the scriptwriter but a viewer might get the impression that much of it was shot from an outline with improvised dialog and that shots that other directors might have redone were used in the final cut. Much of “Love is a Many Stupid Thing” is boring, puerile and just sloppy but enough of it is funny and sexy to give it a neutral rating.