What is it with Michelle Reis? One of the most beautiful actresses to ever grace the screen, she seems to bring out the worst in some directors. The one really bad movie Stanley Kwan did was Island Tales. The usually reliable Gordon Chan couldn't deliver with Armageddon. Drunken Master 3 was a disaster. And then there was the recent dog movie (EDHHD) which simply ranks as one of the worst HK movies of all time. I'm not saying this is Michelle's fault, she's proven she can act, and obviously she has been in some very good movies too, but lately her career seems rather hit and miss.

So with that in mind, I watched this movie with some initial trepidation. Not that it takes any outside factor to bring out the worst in Wong Jing - he has shown that he is impervious to anything resembling film aesthetics, and is content to churn out forgettable pieces of fluff and/or exploitation, ignoring critics while shooting 3 movies simultaneously and keeping both eyes firmly focused on the box office returns. He does so again with this predictable, formula-driven romantic comedy that doesn't even pretend to have a coherent script but relies instead on the star power of the cast and on the use of as many genre cliches as possible. Wong Jing movies always seem to presume the audience is suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder: is the romantic comedy getting boring? Let's turn the movie into a kidnapping thriller! Bored with that? Let's make it a chick with a disease film... And so on...

But back to the movie: Andy Lau Tak-Wah, sporting one of the ugliest hairdos ever, stars as a lowlife Mongkok loser called Wah, who spends his days idling around with his friend Tart (Nick Cheung) and his mother (played by the very funny Deannie Yip, who almost steals this movie). By means of a series of completely unbelievable conincidences, Wah runs into a rich girl from Shanghai called Ice (Michelle Reis) who's looking for her long lost mother. She has no place to stay, Wah just got dumped by his girlfriend, so things happen as they do in the world of Wong Jing movies - the two of them hook up (what I wanna know is why do I never run into Michelle Reis... ???). Lots of comedic antics ensue (most of them involving Nick Cheung getting beat up), but in the end how can the two stars not fall in love with each other? They oblige. Except there's also a band of kidnappers on the loose, and when they strike, things get complicated. Michelle is in peril and Andy is being framed as the kidnapping suspect. So now we get a couple of car chases and some action thrills, as well as more plot coincidences (Michelle knows sign language, Andy's mother knows Michelle's mother, Andy's ex girlfriend knows the kidnappers...). In the end, Andy gets to do the heroic thing and save the damsel in distress, except that nobody was wearing seatbelts, so now we're in disease film mode - Michelle looking pretty in a hospital bed, and only a partial liver transplant can save her. Any volunteers? I'll leave the rest to your imagination. If you've seen any Wong Jing romantic comedies, you know that somewhere along the line a kiss and lots of fireworks come into play.

The movie is no masterpiece, but it does provide for some laughs and some feel good moments of the guilty pleasure kind (such as seeing Nick Cheung get hit on the head a lot...). So if you like the stars, I'd give it a marginal recommendation.