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You Shoot, I Shoot
2001
Director: Edmond Pang
Stars: Eric Kot, Cheung Tat Ming, Wong Hap Hei, Michael Chan
Eric Kot plays an assassin who has trouble finding work due to the Asian financial crisis. One of his clients offers a lot of work on the condition that it must be filmed. Kot finds a wannabe director (Cheung Tat Ming), and they get good results. Things seem to be going well until one client's request for a "special" movie turns into a task more difficult than the two could imagine.
I am not a fan of Eric Kot -- his Stephen Chow wannabe thing gets old real quick. However, this movie has a pretty unique plot. The only movie that I can think of that would be close is the French movie Man Bites Dog. However, that movie is a "blacker than black" comedy, and You Shoot is almost gleeful in its' approach. Leave it up to Hong Kong to make a screwball comedy about snuff movies, I guess. The fact that You Shoot comes from Golden Harvest -- the studio best known for its family-friendly fare like Jackie Chan movies -- is a bit suprising as well.
What I am getting at here is that this is not Eric Kot's usual kind of movie, and so he doesn't give his usual (bad) performance. Yeah, he still tries really hard to be Stephen Chow (there is one gag totally swiped from Chow's King of Comedy), but he manages to restrain his performance a bit and create (dare I say it?) a likeable character, which translates into better comedy. While as a whole You Shoot isn't as good as some other Hong Kong comedies, there are several pretty funny bits, such as a parody of the Young and Dangerous series (going so far as to use actual actors from the films), that makes the movie worth a viewing if you're into the moy len tau (nonsense) comedies.
RATING: 7
A review of the VCD for this movie can be found here