Comic King 漫画风云

Fung (Julian Cheung) and Yip (Eason Chan) meet while applying for a job at a major comic book publisher. Both of them have undeniable talent: Fung is a wonderful artist, while Yip writes excellent comic book scripts, and the pair soon wins the boss's approval to create their own comics. Before long, however, the company becomes too small for them, and they decide to start their own business — but they quarrel over Mandy, the secretary, and their paths diverge: one creates a variation on the theme of A Man Called Hero, while the other makes a pop-style triad comic in the vein of Young and Dangerous.

Impressions: An utterly chaotic film. One of those rare films that look wonderful and genuinely draw you in, yet with every frame they slash themselves open alive, growing worse and more hopeless with each new shot. The flaws are so numerous that they leap out at you with the desperation of a kamikaze pilot — first and foremost you want to kick the weak script and the talentless direction. There is no conviction or logic in anyone's actions, absolutely flat stock characters and plot devices, and on top of that no coherence in the storytelling, so that potentially interesting ideas (which will be discussed below) are all nipped in the bud because neither the screenwriter nor the director knows how to develop them properly and present them to advantage for their audience.

The actors deliver correspondingly slipshod performances. Relaxed by the fact that the film is about comic books (with the action frequently shifting into the world where the drawn characters live — for the sake of clarity), not one of the central actors even tries to endow their characters with the slightest bit of nuance, vitality, or even plain likability. Flashy mugging — but nothing beyond that. It is impossible to empathize with their problems, they cannot stir any feelings in the viewer — it is like a comic within a comic, as conventional as all of them, and a thoroughly bad one at that.

The only plus worth noting in the film is the cheekily original approach to the comic books that the characters draw. One of them, titled "Sword, Knife and Smile," replicates the cult A Man Called Hero (1999) down to the last detail (even the characters' names are the same), while the second, "Triads," correspondingly mirrors Young and Dangerous (1996) (again, all the same characters). Nicholas Tse, who here plays the imaginary hero of both series, by a funny coincidence played those very same people in the films being parodied: Knife, the protagonist's son, in A Man Called Hero, and Chan Ho-Nam in Young and Dangerous: The Prequel. A genuinely amusing and aptly observed coincidence, but unfortunately, once again, the filmmakers did not even bother to make anything of it.