Romeo and His Butterfly Lover (2023)

Interesting premise

I do like this drama, it is a very interesting twist on two very popular and tragic love stories. It takes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and blends it with the Chinese story of the Butterfly Lovers, put it in a strange setting that is a mix of Hong Kong with a Wild Wild West cowboy feel. You can feel the lawlessness of everything and how people can get shot and killed yet nobody bats an eye.

I am still watching this so will update when it is all done, but so far the mixing up is done pretty well. Will it end with tragedy like the original two stories? Who knows?

Update: I have just completed the series and I can say for sure that the series is good. It is not great, but it is worthy of being a 7/10 easily.

The fusing of two tragic romantic stories somehow managed to work here. Moses Chan as Leung Shan Pak and Aimee Chan as Zuk Ying Toi togetheras a couple was very touching, and I found their romance believable and convincing. Sadly, the other love story with Kalok Chow as Romeo and Kayan Yau as Juliet didn’t work with me. I understand this is following the original Romeo and Juliet’s love at first sight story beat, but my issue is with Kayan Yau as she lacks any onscreen charisma. There was no observable chemistry between her and Kalok so I was never convinced they were in love and wanted to really be together. I actually preferred watching Yuki Law over Kayan, and when that happens you know the casting went wrong somewhere. Please stop pushing Kayan as a female lead until she’s improved further, she’s not ready yet. She wasn’t ready in that TCM drama, and she isn’t ready here.

A wasted opportunity in the drama was when Aimee Chan took on Kalok as a disciple to teach him how to use a gun. They put this all into one episode and suddenly Kalok is pretty good at shooting. They should have done this earlier in the drama so that we would have gotten to see them build a rapport as teacher and student, making the final scenes have more impact. I won’t spoil it, but the final scenes with them both in there would have had a bigger emotional hit if we had witnessed this bond over the series.

One major gripe I had with the drama was the constant gun spinning and twirling the characters do as they drew guns to fight or train. It is so ridiculous sometimes as they would spin it halfway into a life or death gunfight, wasting 2-3 seconds spinning it before opening fire. It feels forced and in real life would have gotten the person killed.

The best part of the series? Weirdly enough, Joman Chiang as Zuk Ying Wah, Aimee’s cousin. She is the boss lady of a salon in the lawless 8th district and her gunslinging abilities are the best in the series, like nobody even comes close. Her story is also really tragic so when she goes on a revenge mission you can emphasise with her. Her skills are so badass that she did the Taken film bullet curling while dual-wielding to defeat both Aimee and Moses at the same time. Undoubtedly the coolest character in the drama, so her absence at the end of the drama was a huge hit for me. I was secretly rooting for Moses to get with her instead of Aimee… that’s how much I liked her. TVB, do a sequel with Joman and give her a happy ending!!! Do it!!! Easy win!!

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Difficult not to feel for Joman Chiang. Elena Kong deserves her revenge. The ending sucks.

Spoilers ahead. I will also disclaim that I do not care about and have no attachment to the source material which this is loosely adapted from, and view this as more of an original work than anything.


Moses Chan, Aimee Chan and the ending

I came into this knowing that Moses Chan and Aimee Chan are married in real life, this is Aimee’s first role for quite a number of years, and they were acting a couple, so I did have certain expectations shall I say. As someone who really does not care about either Moses Chan or Aimee Chan, or ship them together, I really hated the ending. So I guess if I were a fan I would really really hate it.

This is despite me believing that it is extremely difficult not to feel for Joman Chiang’s Zhu Ying Hua, and I nearly couldn’t watch when Moses Chan’s Max Tom dropped her without a second thought for Aimee Chan’s Zhu Ying Tai (the spoiler in this may be more that Moses Chan’s and Joman Chiang’s characters had some kind of relationship more than he left her for Aimee).

Seriously if you’re a Moses Chan or Aimee Chan fan, or if you like them together (their characters or in real life), when you see Moses Chan and Kalok Chow confronting Elena Kong in the final episode, where Elena Kong has a gun to the first brother’s (Felix Ng) head you should stop watching. If you’re thinking but wait, I picked this up to watch Moses Chan and Aimee Chan act a couple and there weren’t enough scenes, I hear you but it is my view that continuing to watch will not make the situation any better. I will however state that by all indications, they are truly in love and the ending does not derogate from that.

I didn’t watch the entire show, I watched this for Elena Kong and whatever else sparked my interest because it became obvious quite quickly that I didn’t think it was interesting enough to watch without skipping. Apparently this has been compared to Death by Zero, and in terms of there being some kind of fictional world order where one has to suspend one’s disbelief and similarities in the casting, I agree. After all, it has Moses Chan, Elena Kong, Helen Ma, Timothy Cheng, Mary Hon as well as a substantial number of side characters I don’t really care about, to me reeks of Death by Zero.


Elena Kong’s Dora deserves her revenge

I could recommend clicking through this for Elena Kong as her parts are generally not that filler, and her storyline is discrete enough for one to figure out what is going on with her. I do believe that Pat Poon’s character is scum and that she did deserve her revenge on him. I can’t say that I thought she was an excellent schemer, if she was, she would’ve kept her cards closer to her chest and not basically gone around trumpeting that she wanted her revenge so early (though I think that would have meant less material so from a show standpoint I suppose that makes sense).

The moment she wanted to continue her revenge despite promising Judy Kwong’s Molly that she would not do anything to harm the brothers but continued to do so anyway, my view was that the only right ending was for her to die, but to die laughing (because she successfully got her revenge). The thing is that she could have stopped after the third brother was killed, and I believe, perhaps lived in some semblance of peace with Judy Kwong and the boys - because it seems to me that the boys believed that she was not entirely unjustified in taking revenge on their father, and I think seemed to think that for twenty years, she was a good stepmother. I actually might have preferred an ending where she kept her word to Judy Kwong, since the boys (by Dora’s own admission) are actually innocent.

The scene where she realises that Pat Poon is dead was beautifully beautifully acted by Elena. (This is even considering that Elena is more than a good actress and I’ve watched many of her shows.)


It’s extremely difficult not to feel for Joman Chiang’s Zhu Ying Hua.

Joman Chiang appears in just under half the episodes, but these exact episodes were when I was the most invested in the series. After Joman’s and Elena’s final scene, the tension seemed to be released. I did not know who Joman was before this, and in fact had to google to double check that I was getting the actress right because whatever initial photos one sees of her look quite different from her image in this show. Despite watching this show for Elena Kong and clicking through the rest of the show – I do not recall Elena and Joman sharing a single scene, and Elena’s nexus to Joman is her collaboration with Timothy Cheng who wishes to make use of Joman to re-establish his position in the Zhu family - Joman still caught my eye.

Despite how wild the ride is when she is initially introduced - she goes from dancing to flirting to having a gun held to her head then back to flirting before you worrying she was going to get scammed, but then it turns out that she’s scamming the scammer, meeting an ill Moses Chan, her son’s life being threatened, expelling the scammers and finally threatening to shoot Moses Chan - in a very short span of time, I found that I was invested in her Zhu Ying Hua.

Yes, I think it helps that the script is probably written in such a way for you to like her, but probably not to the extent of covering your eyes and crying out “this is unacceptable” when Aimee Chan’s Zhu Ying Tai and Moses Chan’s Max Tom hugged right under her nose. It really did feel that way. It really felt unacceptable - and it felt unacceptable before I even knew that her son (Curtis Ho) was going to be killed. I know that this is the Moses Chan and Aimee Chan show, and despite knowing that, it still felt unacceptable.

I believe that Zhu Ying Hua is perfectly entitled to seek her revenge against her son’s killer, even if she did so in a manner which was rash. At any point, even if I thought that Zhu Ying Hua was wrong, I still thought that it was understandable why she was doing what she was and that it was very very difficult not to feel for her. But she ended up finding the right person to direct her revenge at, and well, directed her revenge. Even after that I still can’t help but feel for her (though I was happy to see that she had made up with Zhu Ying Tai and Max Tom right after she avenged her son).

I thought that she was very cute together with Curtis Ho’s Hao Zai, so that also helped her case when she wanted to avenge her son.

She has the benefit of some plot armor, but Joman Chiang was very cool as a gunslinger.

Joman Chiang didn’t act perfectly - I think some of the earlier scenes where she raises her voice at the staff are kind of awkward, specifically I think that her raising her voice sometimes comes across as forced and that the actress doesn’t raise it often (but I think that is not supposed to be a part of Zhu Ying Hua as a character). I think an argument can be made that the scene in which she shot Dai Yiu Ming was overacted by her, but at the same time, someone who has suffered as much loss as she has in such a short amount of time would lose it, and people react differently to that, so maybe she didn’t overact it. I’m not sure. But that being said, she is a good actress and having watched her in this, I am interested in her work and have since gone on to watch some of her other stuff.


Other thoughts

Timothy Cheng’s Zhu Ren Yi is evil through and through and it is Zhu Ying Hua’s bad luck to be his daughter. Even in his final scene, he makes excuses which are so so SO bad and tries to put the blame on other people. I was quite speechless. Elena’s Dora for all the revenge that she sought, didn’t put the blame on anyone else, told Judy where her boyfriend was and apologised to Judy. Judy doesn’t have good luck but I suppose even in her capacity as Pat Poon’s (unwilling) wife, Elena did try her best to take care of Judy when she was growing up and I think that is not denied. He is easy to hate as an antagonist, which I think is exactly where he is supposed to be so surely it was well acted by him.

I did not care about Kalok Chow’s Romeo or Yau Kayan’s Juliet. In fact, when Romeo was pointing a gun to his head crying over Juliet’s “dead body”, I liked the idea of him putting a bullet through his own head. Needless to say, this was not helped by the ending where let’s say that sacrifices were made for them to get married.

Yuki Law is cute and attention grabbing compared to Yau Kayan (I do think she is cute even without comparison to Yau Kayan), so something seems off when I watch Yuki Law’s Zhu Li Fa wait on Yau Kayan’s Juliet.

I do think that there are too many side characters – Kalok Chow has his own side characters, Moses Chan has his own side characters, Aimee Chan has her own men, Joman Chiang has her own side characters. I think except for Tsui Wing’s Wen Cai (whom Helen Ma’s character should not have killed), I don’t think I particularly cared for any of them. To be fair, I watched all the scenes involving the Eighth District, though I can’t tell you if I would have watched them if I didn’t like Joman Chiang’s Zhu Ying Hua.

Ultimately I don’t think I was invested in anything but Zhu Ying Hua avenging her son and not dying, Dora getting her revenge (dying was fine), and only towards the very tail end of drama, Zhu Ying Tai and Max Tom. I can’t exactly put my finger on why that was the case, I guess for me includes the factors stated above.

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