About 20 mins into this harebrained Canto comedy, Miriam Yeung shrugs her shoulders and says “I’m a goof!” Daniel Wu asks her to be serious; she looks at him firmly and says slowly, “I… am… a… goof…”.
That pretty much sums up why it is hard to take her or the film seriously; she’s just goofing around. The flick has its moments, mostly at the start, with a couple of nifty sequences which show how she was demoted after her promotion at the end of the first film. Her constant pratfalls are funny (because pratfalls are always funny). There are some groovy ideas (like a Russian Folk Dance Club in Shanghai, and the gang of rich thieves, and a group of geriatric robbers called the Godfather 4 who tote antique weaponry and rob businesses which have long since closed), and hearing Daniel Wu break out some French, English, Russian and Cantonese is kinda nifty.
But mostly it just ambles about in a goofy fashion. The shtick ripped off from Stephen Chow films just goes how hard he works at making this stuff seem effortless. Rather, here we have comedy of the school whereby if enough actors run around and shout lots, it’s bound to be funny, right? Nyet.
Miriam Yeung has yards of natural talent, and shone in the badly titled but damn enjoyable Dummy Mommy Without a Baby, but she’s put so little effort into her roles since, it’s getting hard to put any effort into going to see ’em. She’s becoming Cecilia Cheung Lite, but damn, I don’t know if that’s even possible…