Ming Ming is a new age martial arts princess and she is also known as lady Robin Hood who steals for love. D, Prince Charming, is a maverick fighter and an irresistible rogue. He posts a challenge to his swarms of female admirers - that he will run away with whoever who gives him 5 million dollars to Harbin.
by zheff01
on 04/07/2007 1 of 2 people found this review helpful
What I loved most: Visuals, music, creatives, strong casting
What I really hated: Profound
The movie is not perfect. in fact its not a commericial film more like an Art film. The story is a bit messy and sometimes slow. definitely room for improvement. BUT still i must say the director put in a lot of effort. Its a very stylish film. each scene is crafted rather well. The music by People Mountain People Sea is also good.
Casting is strong. All of them did a good job. Zhou xun acted well. Jeff Chang is quite cool inside and quite a selling point for the movie, but he just did a speacial apperance. character could be more developed. overall, it was worth to watch it, something different from the rest of the movies now. Good or bad, i think it created an impact on all viewers.
I walked into the cinema not having the foggiest about "Ming Ming" other than the fact that it is a Mandarin/Cantonese film. It came as a pleasant surprise that I was in for the most stylised montage of Hong Kong neo-noir that I've ever seen.
Right from the off, the big screen gets plastered with such an array of dazzling lights and zipping sounds, you start checking your bearings to see if you are really there. I can definitely attest to GSC Mid Valley's awesome Hall 3 after watching this film, especially during a scene where a motorbike helmet spins on a table with such crisp screeching across the auditorium. You could almost swear that you spun the helmet yourself.
That helmet belongs to Zhou Xun's titular character, Ming Ming - a vixen of a woman who possesses some fearsome other-worldly martial art skills which she uses to good cinematic effect each time she kicks baddie ass. Yes, there are lots of them to kick. She is deeply in love with the Daniel Wu's character simply named D, a man whose sole purpose in life is to get five million dollars to go to Harbin, North China.
Ming Ming goes round to Brother Cat's to steal the cash and does some serious fighting along the way. Not content with just the moolah, she also nicks a mysterious wooden box that seems, we are told, to be more important than all the money in the world. Leaving the scene, she suddenly spots, wait for it... her lookalike! Seizing the opportunity to use her, the sinister Ming Ming lets the mob confuse one twin with the other, setting the trail on to Na Na instead, the fire-haired lookalike. Na Na flirts with cheap gangster Tu, played by Taiwanese star Tony Yang, as they develop an uncomfortable attraction. Meanwhile, D goes missing and both the women start to discover the connection between the mysterious box and D's tortured past. Rather fun, I should say.
Still, the film is problematic.
Uneven in its execution, and yet purposefully so, it becomes difficult to give the film its dues. In fairness, the multiple freeze frames and colour splashes are rather cool, I just could not get past the various filming techniques used here, how all the scenes do not seem to belong to the same movie. The director is actually a long-time music video director so we can see where the disjointed tracks came from. A useful decider then rests on the ending, a climactic twist which is no doubt unpredictable, but thoroughly unrewarding for the viewer.
There is nothing new here that we have not seen before. It is just that we have never seen it all at once in the same film. Susie Au's debut film thus becomes a beautiful mess. And some of you are going to wish she would clean it up.
