Crazy New Year's Eve 一路惊喜

All posters ²³

Screenplay: 5.0

Acting: 7.0

Visual side: 7.0

Music: 7.0

Overall rating: 5.0

There are only a few hours left until the New Year, but far from everyone is frozen in anticipation of the holiday. A group of teenagers gets stuck on the road back from a resort. A wealthy businessman is forced to travel home by train, with the "common folk." A young woman waits for her longtime sweetheart, hoping he will finally propose. A large family gathers around a dying patriarch and gradually bickers, trying to decide what to do with the apartment he lived in. A superstar is late for a New Year's concert because his wife is giving birth, and he is forced to choose what matters more to him. Two police officers stake out a criminal at his grandmother's house – he always comes to visit the old woman for the New Year.

It's clear that our own "Yolki" didn't invent the "New Year's anthology film" formula, but for some reason Crazy New Year's Eve invites comparison specifically with that Russian franchise – to stand on the same rung as something like "Love Actually," the Chinese film simply doesn't have the guts, but with our homegrown "olivier blockbuster" it has a great deal in common. Starting with a pile of characters connected to one another in the most tenuous way, and the slightly stale, "averagely safe" humor, and ending with the syrupy, tear-jerking moral that all people are brothers, and on New Year's Eve even more so, so have some conscience.

The film has six storylines, and since they were handled by different directors, they vary quite noticeably in style, mood and, on the whole, quality. Thus, the story about teenagers lost in the woods is the emptiest and most unnecessary, the plot with the lovers is the most dynamic and "alive," the segment about the train is the most cohesive and complete. They are tied together very tenuously indeed, and the restless editing switches the action from one story to another without any discernible pattern, so you won't be bored, but at the same time it produces a slight feeling of chaos – perhaps it goes down well when you're at the cinema during the holidays, but on an "ordinary day" it does the film no favors.

On the other hand, such films aren't made to impress critics, so all the complaints about Crazy New Year's Eve, including its utterly unoriginal scripts, shatter against the colorful, deftly edited imagery, the slightly insistent but at times genuinely moving "bonding," and the abundance of famous faces on screen. Although, of course, the latter applies mainly to mainland residents – the celebrities here are mostly local, no world-class superstars were shipped in for this film.