This movie is available for purchase at www.hkflix.com

Rating:

3

AKA: Mob Sister

Year of release: 2005

Genre: crime drama

Director: Wong Ching Po

Writer: Szeto Kam

Producer: Lawrence Cheng

Editor: Wong Ching Po

Cinematography: Kenny Lam

Stars: Karena Lam, Eric Tsang, Anthony Wong, Yuen Wah, Simon Yam, Alex Fong, Annie Lau, Lau Yip

Rated IIB for language and violence

DVD Information

Company: Joy Sales

Format: widescreen

Languages: Cantonese, Mandarin

Subtitles: Chinese, English

Extras: plot synopsis, deleted scenes, making-of featurette, trailers, music video

Notes: Not much to talk about; this is a solid DVD.

Related links:

Anthony Wong biography
Simon Yam biography
Movie Review index
Main Page

Ah Sou

Unlike a lot of other Hong Kong movie reviewers, I think I've been pretty forgiving to their output over the last couple of years. It's probably due to the love I have of Hong Kong's "golden age" of the late 1980's-early 1990's that I haven't jumped on the "Hong Kong cinema is dead" bandwagon. But that's getting harder and harder to do. Hong Kong's output this year has been less than stellar (to say the least), and features like Ah Sou (aka Mob Sister) aren't going to sway anyone's opinion that Hong Kong studios are making a comeback anytime soon.

Directed by Wong Ching Po (Jiang Hu), Ah Sou tells the story of a young woman (newcomer Annie Lau) who is promoted to the top of a Triad gang after her father (Eric Tsang), the former dai lo, is assassinated. Of course, the girl doesn't want to become a gangster (she's more interested in pursuing a romance with the local pizza delivery boy), and this leads to all sorts of double-crosses as the remaining leaders in the gang vie for power. As with most movies of this type, things come to a head in a series of bloody confrontations that lead to the crowning of the true leader of the gang.

Ah, where to begin? The plot is hardly nothing new, and the acting is sub-par. Annie Lau is wooden and uninspiring, and even veterans like Simon Yam and Anthony Wong seem to be phoning in their performances. Ah Sou is also poorly-paced; there's just way too much time dedicated to the pizza boy romantic bits, especially since the relationship never seems to go anywhere -- which is kind of a metaphor for the movie as a whole. Through the whole running time, Ah Sou accomplishes nothing. We never like the characters and don't care what happens to them. I spent a good portion of Ah Sou's running time wondering exactly when it would end, and I suspect most viewers -- even hard-core HK movie fans -- will end up feeling the same.

Probably the most damning part of Ah Sou is Wong Ching Po himself. He mistakes gimmickry (animated sequences, sideways shots, slow-motion, etc.) for story-telling. There are just way too many "look at me" moments which come off as film school-inspired cinematic mastrubation, rather than actual film-making. Disappointingly, this seems to be where Hong Kong movies have been headed nowadays, with directors just throwing everything in their palletes against the wall and seeing if anything sticks. In all honesty, if this is the sort of output Hong Kong studios are going to be churning out from now on, most viewers aren't going to stay faithful for that much longer -- even the most die-hard fanboys have their limits.