I was not familiar with the existence of this movie prior to happening to find it by sheer random luck. And as a fan of Asian cinema, then of course I picked it up and gave it a go. I must admit that I had some expectations for the movie, as the synopsis made the movie sound like it could be a very interesting one. And for the vast majority, then Asian cinema tends to put out rather enjoyable movies.
"Cherry Returns" turned out to be a mediocre mystery movie with elements of crime and drama. However, it was the mystery that was the main focus of the movie.
The storyline was adequate, although it was horribly forced and artificial in a way, which ultimately dragged the movie down into a mediocre soup of a story.
I was only familiar with Ka Tung Lam on the cast list, and he wasn't even in a particularly big role here. So it was sort of refreshing to see entirely new faces on the screen, and I will say that people were doing good enough jobs with their given roles and characters, although they were restricted and limited by the script and by director Chris Chow.
"Cherry Returns" was a somewhat muddled mess of a movie, as director Chris Chow was trying to accomplish way too much and effectively tripping over his own attempts in the process.
The storyline progress at an adequate pacing, although it just comes off as being too random and apparently the red line got cut somewhere along the way, and the movie struggled to find its way back and never got back on track.
The editing of the movie was also somewhat of a confusing end result, because the cuts and transitions between some scenes was just too abrupt and really lacked a coherent and smooth transition to further the storyline. I will say that the production value of the movie was top notch, so thumbs up on that part at least.
And while most of this movie does take place in Hong Kong, it is always frustrating to have to sit through Mandarin dialogue, especially since it should be Cantonese. Sure, I get that some people also speak Mandarin in Hong Kong, but it is not the native tongue there.
This was hardly an outstanding movie to the Hong Kong / Chinese cinema. It was adequate enough for a single viewing, for sure. But other than that, don't get your hopes up for this train wreck of a story.
