Laughing Gor - Qian Zui Fan

So this is a late review but I just saw this movie on TV.

This was a really good movie. It's not perfect and the explosion/fire scenes just look terribly done with the CGI. That being said, the acting was really good. It made you wonder who was really the good or bad guy.

I don't see why it's "confusing". I thought the plot was fairly easy for me to predict. The story was coherent, if not completely satisfying. The previous reviewer probably didn't understand the conversations that were going on.

I was only interested in this movie because I just recently found out that it's a sequel to the TV show Lives of Omission. This movie was pretty boring. Nothing really memorable happened. It's labeled as an action thriller but I found nothing thrilling nor any real action. The lead actor was good as Laughing and Francis Ng played the villain excellently. He's a psychology professor who knows how to analyze and read people to manipulate them. At times he makes me question the concept of black and white and what is good and what is bad. He had potential but the plot was kind of jumbled and confusing. I don't see what his motives were in doing all the things he did. There's also a female character who's a drug dealer and I don't see why she's even needed to be in the movie. Besides Laughing and the professor I didn't care about the other characters. I felt like this movie tried too hard to be clever by having flashbacks and trying to tie the new characters to event that happened in the show.

As much as I enjoy Hong Kong cinema and as much as I enjoy movies that Francis Ng are in, then "Laughing Gor" (aka "Turning Point 2") was somewhat of a disappointing experience. The movie simply tried to bite off too big a piece and failed miserably.

Director Herman Yau tries to take a handful of different aspects of story lines and put it together into a single story, but the end result is confusing and, well bluntly put, terrible. There is no red thread throughout the movie, it is all just mostly bits and pieces of various story lines and information, that really doesn't add up to a whole greater wholesome image.

There were too many characters to keep track of, and most of them were superficial characters that really didn't have much time on the screen, but still played a rather important part of this confusing storyline.

The story is about an undercover police officer whose identity gets erased when the only police officer familiar with his undercover identity in the prison dies. But it is also the story of a psychologist who tries to mobilize a revolution against the legal system. And the story of a wronged bride-to-be who seeks only to be with her deceased husband, and projects his image onto her doctor.

But the storyline mix up doesn't end there, as there are far many other aspects to the story, that just takes the mold of the storyline and mashes it up until it has become incomprehensible soup.

One of the better things to this movie, is that there is a fair amount of popular Hong Kong stars in the movie. So that should count for something at least.

"Laughing Gor" was a rather disappointing addition to the Hong Kong cinema, and only Francis Ng's performance made it possible to sit through the entire movie.