This drama is surprisingly good, but…

I thought I would watch it for a while before writing a review as it started out pretty good, but as most dramas shown on TVB get worse later after a good start, I was hesitant to post an early opinion on this. However, I did not need to be concerned as this drama kicks all kinds of butt!

Vincent Wong stars as the Song Sai Kit, the incredibly intelligent, hilarious and sometimes lecherous lawyer. He had the potential to become a government official but gave up when he noticed how officials just bullied people, instead swapping his exam paper with a future ally played by Lam Chi Chung. Many do not know who Lam Chi Chung is until you say “oh you know, that fat guy who was in Stephen Chow’s last few movies” and immediately people go “oooh!!” Lam Chi Chung is also the director of this drama, and you can see some of the Stephen Chow influences in this drama for sure, but I believe this is fine because he was able to work with such a legend.

We follow Vincent around as he makes a name for himself slowly becoming known as the greatest lawyer or “King of Lawyers” for his righteous deeds, albeit not always his original intention for doing so. Watching the main characters do some cross dressing and getting into mischief was all very entertaining to watch. Elaine Yiu plays Ling Lung, Vincent’s wife in the drama and she does an amazing job in portraying the simple-minded and naive nature of the character, along with her great knowledge of martial arts. The chemistry between her and Vincent is okay, nothing amazing but it represents their relationship early in the drama accurately as Vincent initially wanted a divorce as he was forced into the marriage.

What spurred me to write this review was the recent case that just wrapped up in episode 14 and had me laughing my butt off. Vincent decides to spread his name around China so travels with his wife and buddies to a neighbouring town. In this town, there is a disgusting villain who cons people into digging up coal under the pretence of digging up gold, making them sign contracts that essentially prevent them leaving early. When these people discover it’s coal and not gold so want to leave, they get beaten half to death and cannot go since the contracts prevent them anyway. This villain was named Wong Ho Shun, basically Vincent Wong actual Chinese name. Vincent essentially spends a few episodes calling himself a disgusting asshole and every other curse from the period, which is hilarious if you’re in on the joke. Later when under a disguise, he is asked what his name was so he gave a false name Cheung Chun-long, which is Owen Cheung’s real name and an actor he worked with on several TVB dramas. That was a great meta joke and you need to be a fan of TVB dramas to really get it but I loved it.

The weakest parts of the drama come from two places: Ada Wong and the dubbing. Ignoring that Ada Wong is Wong Jing’s daughter (yes, THAT Wong Jing), here she only has one mode: angry uncivilised girl. She just growls and screams all her lines so there is nothing really compelling about her character, she’s just there to be the love interest to Ah Kau, played by King Kong Lee, but at least it isn’t too offensive so I can ignore it. Also, the dubbing can be quite jarring. Luckily the lipsync is very good but you can tell when a section was dubbed over because of how the audio changes and feels off. I understand that some lines need to be dubbed due to poor audio at the time of recording, but as I always say, just get a better boom mic.

So far this is great. This drama only had 18 episodes so we have 4 left and haven’t seen Benny Chan yet, so I am guessing the final 4 episodes will involve him somehow. Man, I am not a fan of Benny Chan as his acting is literally just him shouting a lot, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe Lam Chi Chung flexed his director muscle/fat and reined in Benny’s anger acting? We can only wait and see.

Update: dammit, the final case gave me huge mixed emotions. The last case is really the most complex and the stakes are high. We really see the main cast acting serious, it is great to see Vincent Wong and Elaine Yiu finally using their dramatic acting skills finally as the entire drama up until then had been very lighthearted. However, the screenwriter messes this all up.

We see Ada Wong get drugged and violently raped by a British Envoy. She is found by King Kong Lee and taken to safety. Up until then I found Ada really annoying but after that scene and seeing her reaction later as she had to deal with the trauma of what happened to her and finding out that Vincent was going to defend that British Envoy, I felt she had improved and was going to accept her character. But not a few episodes later, after a week of so had passed in the drama, she appeared to back to normal and completely fine! No PTSD? No fear of going out alone at night? She recovered remarkably quickly as if rape was such an easy thing to get over. Wtf?

What I also found ridiculous was Ling Long’s secret back story. Vincent divorces her so that in the event he messes up the case with the British guy that he would not get her killed as well, but just as assassins come to kill Vincent due to him deciding to turn against the British guy, Ling Long suddenly appears and fights them all off. Now this scene alone was really dumb because in the entire fight Ling Long is outnumbered by 20 people or more, and yet the assassins all target her when she appears and nobody thinks “oh hey while she is busy let’s chop Sung Sai Kit in half” as nobody pays him any attention. In any case, they manage to escape and we find out Ling Long was a member of the Little Dagger Clan that helped people, and that clan decided that Vincent was worth protecting as he looked like he could also help people. So how do they decide to protect him. Let Ling Long marry him. What? So you’re telling me Ling Long, who was working at a brothel when they first met, suddenly decided at that time Vincent was worth protecting and became his wife? This is not elaborated on at all, when did the clan decide he was worth protecting? How did they know he would not be a selfish money grabbing bastard? Nothing is explained!

And finally we get to Benny Chan as Chan Mong Gat, who finally appears in the last 2 episodes. The guy has not changed at all, his acting is just him shouting loudly and being obnoxious. There is not subtlety at all to his acting method, so I was glad he only appeared very briefly, but it was so brief that I do not think he was worth adding to the main poster of the drama. Why put him in there?

Despite those issues, overall this is a good drama. The crap dragged the score from a 9 to a 7 because it felt rushed and sensitive topics were not approached tactfully. It felt like this needed to be 20 episodes and not 18, but hey I didn’t decide on the episode count. The drama ends on a cliffhanger so we may get a season 2, hopefully season 2 has more episodes and handles it’s sensitive topics more carefully.

Citeste mai mult

An average drama with a seriously annoying male lead

I do love a drama about gods and demons and so on. At first glance this appeared to tick the boxes, but then it fell into the predictable cliches TVB employs.

I usually find Brian Tse pretty bland to watch, almost like wallpaper paste or window dressing that is just a white veil. Nothing offensive but nothing outstanding, he is just there. However, this is a perfect match for his role as an immortal because the expected mannerisms of Lu Dong Bin just somehow compliments his acting method tremendously well. I found myself quite enjoying him in this role and I never thought I would say that. Predictably, the moment he was introduced with all his magical powers, TVB had to take them away so that the drama could last 20 episodes instead of being sorted in a single one, but the way he loses his powers was by his beard getting set on fire. That made no sense, why would his magical powers be tied to his beard? That’s like working out and getting all these muscles but one day losing your physique because somebody shaved your pubic hair.

Erica Chan is okay. So far - 7 episodes in - I do not have any lasting impression of her. The actress can be pretty good as she was one of the standout female characters of that TCM drama, but here she is just… there. I don’t hate her character but I feel like she lack the main female lead charisma needed to carry the show.

And then we have the most annoying character in the show played by Danny Hung. Man, he is a swindler here but he spends most of it constantly acting like a brash childish idiot screaming at Brian Tse the entire time. Brian has amazing patience as he accepts being shouted at but I just found myself hating Danny the more I watched the drama. It is not really Danny’s acting since he was great in the TCM drama, it was just that his role was so poorly written. He has two modes so far: throwing himself into a jealous outburst whenever anybody even comes close to Erica, or acting all high and noble as everybody thinks his is an immortal. His character was also written so stupidly, because he backstory was that he really believed in Lu Dong Bin as a child, but one day people came over to his house demanding his grandfather paid his debt due to his grandfather’s gambling habit. He prayed to Lu Dong Bin for help but Lu never came, and so he doesn’t believe in the gods and uses it to swindle people. Like his grandfather brought it on himself, how could he blame it on the gods? He should have blamed his grandfather for gambling with no abandon.

In any case, let’s see how this progresses. I never thought Brian Tse would be this dramas’ saving grace but there you go.

Update: yet another filler drama from TVB that just disappoints. We get the demon as I was hoping for but unfortunately it was introduced too late to really matter. So a “hidden treasure map” is introduced mid-way into the drama, leading to Danny discovering the map to it and finding a magical hairpin. Yes, of all things, it is a magical hairpin stuck inside a rock face. Danny removes it and discovers he can do magical feats with it, but at the cost of his health every time he uses it. It turns out that Brian’s godly Lu Dong Bin fought a demonic Pangolin that had 1000 years of magical training so was highly formidable so was unable to beat it. To help him, Erica - who was then a fairy - stole the Queen Mother of the West’s hairpin in order to give it to Brian and aid him in his fight against the Pangolin. The Queen Mother discovers this and was very upset about this not because she stole the hairpin, but because Erica fell in love with Brian (oh no) so she is punished to suffer 10 cycles of life to let go of her love. Meanwhile, Brian managed to defeat the Pangolin with the hairpin because of all the moisturiser that rubbed off on it from the Queen Mother’s head, but not enough to kill it completely but only seal him within the mountain as long as the L’Oreal hairpin stayed in there.

Danny was an annoying anus all the way until the end. He does something really heroic at the end despite learning it would likely kill him and he ends up in heaven facing the King of Heaven, but he spends the entire time disrespecting someone this important, but the King Of Heaven is really easygoing. The King of Heaven later offers Danny the chance to study and train to become a god, but Danny declines it (wtf?) The final episodes forces Danny and Erica together and I feel that it was undeserved because for 19 episodes Erica was pining after Brian, who as a god could not reciprocate her feelings. Then, out of the blue, Erica suddenly cares about Danny and then boom, they get together. No. It was totally unearned.

Again, Brian is the only redeeming feature of this drama. I liked his acting here but it is not enough for me to rewatch this in the future. Just Danny’s character in this was enough for me to never touch this again.

Citeste mai mult

A great drama, best one in 2023 in my opinion

When I heard Charmaine Sheh was returning to TVB for this one drama I was excited because she was one of my favorite actors to watch on TVB in the past. And here for this drama she does not disappoint. She is a strong independent woman who is called the Queen of News and you can tell from all her interactions and actions that she clearly is the Queen, and had worked hard to get to that position. The other members of the cast really compliment her well as we have great acting such as from Kenneth Ma as her rival at the SNK news station really driving up the tension between the two.

This drama really had the feel of the period drama piece Beyond the Realm of Conscience and its sequel also by TVB, but put into a modern setting. There is a lot of shadowy underhanded work and backstabbing with people constantly switching sides so it just had you second guessing everything that was going on. We have Samantha Ko who started out working for Kenneth and using her sex appeal to draw in the viewers, but she switches sides to Charmaine the moment she felt Kenneth was losing, and we have Regina Ho who was being trained to take over from Charmaine by Charmaine herself, but it turned out she was actually undercover for Kenneth and was secretly dating him. And you have the Director of the station played by Eric Tang who appears to foster calm and friendly competition but was secretly plotting against Charmaine with Kenneth, yet he can’t do much as Charmaine has the support of his boss, Mrs Fong played by Mimi Kung. Their relationships are confusingly intertwined, so you really do not know what is going to happen at any moment. The reveals just kept having me going “whoa what?”

The person with the most interesting character arc was played by Selena Lee. She started out as the neutral party and was vehemently against siding with Charmaine or Kenneth, instead focusing on delivering the truth to viewers. But as the drama went on, she found her beliefs tested and ended up in a real dark place. She came out of it with a massive heel turn, switching from righteous reporter to selfish Selena. As we watch her progress, we understand her thinking and sympathise with her decisions.

The only actor I found annoying was Regina Ho. Man, she is portrayed as this really easily manipulated idiot who is ashamed of her humble beginnings and cannot even handle her younger sister being this brat that needed to be disciplined. Later she started to hallucinate as she started to have a mental breakdown. She was annoying enough already, but she had to commit the biggest sin in the drama by cheating on Kenneth Ma with her uber driver. Like wtf?

The final episodes were not as tense and dramatic as the earlier ones, but it does end with Charmaine’s past catching up with her and a hostage situation to resolve, but I am hopeful for the future because Bosco Wong made a cameo appearance at the end as a possible new rival for Charmaine. That had me very excited, season 2 hurry up and come!

Citeste mai mult

This is a great comedy drama! Worth rewatching!

I watched this when it came it first came out but never wrote a review about it as I was busy at the time, but as I have recently watched it again I can safely say this is one great comedy drama that is worth rewatching!

I usually don’t like watching martial art period dramas, but this one is obviously a parody of those kinds of dramas and somehow manages to make it hilarious in the process. For you to really enjoy it, you’d need to understand all the meta references it throws at you, and laugh at the old spins on modern technology such as paper scrolling lyrics on their take of a karaoke machine. There are also so many great Cantonese puns that you would miss out on if you do not understand the language. Whoever came up with 首振鎮個鎮守 was a genius, I always smile whenever it gets mentioned. This drama just kept throwing them at you that it was a non-stop laugh fest when you’re watching it and you get it.

This is also one of the rare dramas where I did not dislike anybody in it. Even Jeannie Chan, who was awful in The Beauty of War, was pretty funny and likeable as the aggressive and amnesiac Princess, who was constantly shouting at her fiancé, Kalok Chow. By far the best part of the drama was watching the 3 amigos Kalok Chow, Brian Chu and Jonathan Cheung interacting and just being really stupid. I liked them all individually with Kalok’s weak body but fast talking style, Brian’s terrible aptitude for martial arts that causes him to develop a mental condition, and Jonathan as the really stupid but massively hilarious idiot of the three who spouts some real nonsense. When the three of them are onscreen at the same time, you can guarantee there would be some pure TV comedy gold.

What are you waiting for? Go watch it! Hopefully the sequel/prequel comes out for it soon because I am hyped!

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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!!

Citeste mai mult

At least make the characters sing!

Do you want to see how TVB can waste a talented guy like Owen Cheung? If so, watch this drama. Here Owen plays a music composer and has fallen into some rough times because of being accused of plagiarism. He decides to move to a small village to get away from all the drama, and that is when he meets a Chinese opera loving female ghost played by Katy Kung.

There is only one interesting plot point with a bastard plagiarising Owen and making it appear as if it was the other way around, but they sort out this issue too early in the drama. The rest of it is all boring opera stuff that had me yawning the entire time. I don’t mind Chinese opera, but the issue is that this drama managed to make it so uninteresting. The worst part is that all the female singers are clearly dubbed, especially Katy Kung as the dub is very obvious as the lips do not match the singing. If TVB actors can learn gun fighting and choreography and so on, they can learn to sing Chinese opera music. And if mot just cast a person who can, why Katy Kung? Why Tiffany Lau?

The entire show was very predictable as well. Owen Cheung just happened to look EXACTLY like the boyfriend of the Katy Kung ghost, and yet it never crosses their mind maybe he is the reincarnation of the boyfriend despite Owen having dreams of his past life. Instead they spend the rest of it looking for the boyfriend as if he was alive. Then later - gasp - it turns out he is the reincarnation and that in his past life he was murdered! Whoa I did not see that coming (!). Later when the main big bad appears, it is right near the end of the drama so we don’t get time to get to know the guy, it is just boom - there he is - then boom - bad stuff. And - coincidentally - the big bad happened to know ghost catching magic as well. Like how much plot convenience crap can you cram into one drama?

And the funniest part? Katy Kung is a ghost and we all know this, but for reasons only known to the writers, she is the only ghost in the entire drama. She doesn’t meet other ghosts and we never see any other ghosts besides her. If she is a ghost then logically there would be others, and with a huge place like Hong Kong you can’t tell me that there would be no wandering ghosts hanging around. Come on!

As a result, I think this sucks due to the really poor and lazy writing.

Citeste mai mult

What a messy drama

This drama’s only saving grace is Pakho Chau. The handsome owner of a cafe who is charismatic and friendly and awesome. Even when he goes into his vigilante mode as the Sage Killer to kill what he sees as bad people or “bad bugs”, I kinda found myself rooting for him. He already made the drama a 8/10, but then oh boy… the problems mount up like wtf.

The female lead is played by Venus Wong and her story is pretty sad, but I find her heighten senses and how she controlled them a little unbelievable. To dampen her powers she eats a ton of sweets, and to awaken them she drinks a lemon and salted water concoction. How in earth can she do this for years without suffering from diabetes or high blood pressure is beyond me, but the most ridiculous part is how - with her powers - she can walk into a room where a crime had happened and *feel* what happened there with the residual emotions left behind. She can get into the role of the victim or the perpetrator and deduce the perpetrator with said emotions. I kept on thinking: come on yo, if we wanted a superhero drama we would watch one, what is this? And of course, to force the tension, TVB had her paired with vigilante Pakho so he was constantly having to do this “hide emotions” thing or else she would sense his “evil” side and expose him. A predictable move and I saw it coming a mile away. The only other interesting characters for me was Jinny Ng as this really manipulative and vindictive bitch of a woman who tried to play with the people around her to see how far she could push people to do her bidding, and Mark Ma as this misunderstood working class loudmouth who actually had a heart of gold and was almost a victim of Pakho.

The writing I found was quite messy and the stories do not meld together well enough to form a cohesive whole. It just feels like lumps of stories thrown together at a wall and the screenwriters were hoping the main actors would keep the whole thing together, but it just doesn’t really work.

Citeste mai mult

A law drama I actually like? What?

I am not usually a fan of law dramas, there is usually too much legalese and stuff in them that get really boring no matter who acts in it because it can sometimes feel like it is shoving law knowledge at the viewer without their consent, but this drama is completely different. Instead, the focus is on the human relations and the important ties each person has, which effects the decisions made in a court of law. It does not overuse the court scenes and puts in just enough to make each case entertaining to watch as the lawyers battle it out, with Kenneth Ma handing over yellow notes to help push his side to winning the case.

Once again, Kenneth Ma is outstanding here as a highly talented legal executive who approaches his cases in unconventional ways but within the bounds of the law, and coming up with solutions to difficult situations. I really loved watching him act here, making it his 2nd great TV drama this year right after The Invisibles.

Kenneth has a group of 3 other friends he hangs around with, played by Rosina Lam, Jonathan Cheung and Stephen Wong. These guys have been through so much together since their days at law school and we get to see their camaraderie feel like a really real thing as the drama progresses. Who really stood out here was Stephen Wong as I was so tired of seeing him act as the boring, serious, sour-face guy in most of the dramas I see him in. Name one drama where he has been outgoing, obnoxious and friendly, and I can promise you nothing would come to mind until this drama came out. Seeing him as this smiling, laughing, hugely annoying yet endearing guy was a welcome role change for the guy, and he does a great job portraying a massively talented lawyer.

Even Jonathan Cheung has his moments here as well. He is the very sensible and very well-behaved prude of the group but instead of coming off as annoying and boring, he was actually quite entertaining to watch, especially the awkward exchanges between him and his love interest, a strict judge played by Joman Chiang. Watching Joman go from stern judge to being a little bit girly from her interactions with Jonathan was great, but their love story takes seconds place compared to Kenneth and Rosina's.

The romantic tension between Kenneth and Rosina was the best in the drama. They both clearly are attracted to each other but the timing has always been off with Kenneth constantly finding obstacles between him getting with the girl of his dreams. He even decided that deep down it was God telling him that they could not be together so he resigned himself to that fate. But as per many TVB dramas, they do eventually end up together and the build up to it was fantastic as it led to one very touching moment when they finally embraced. The only weird thing about their relationship while they were together was that they never kissed onscreen,. Did their spouses send them a "no kissing allowed" ultimatum? One thing that I do have to call out is Rosina daydreaming about Raymond Lam, who is Rosina's cousin is real life, so it came off as a little creepy and weird.

Overall a great drama to watch and I highly recommend it. It even has a really catchy main theme song that sticks in your head long after each episode is over. The only major thing to ruin it was the repeated overplaying of the great song "Friends For Life" by Ekin Cheng. It is so overused while watching this that I have grown to really hate the song and have to skip it whenever it comes up on my personal music playlist. A great song ruined by overzealous use in this drama.

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An amazingly touching story

I did not have any idea what I would be watching when I watched this movie, but I did not expect to end up feeling the way I did at the end of it. I really liked this film and it tells its story extremely well.

This movie is based on the true life events of a couple of blind parents who decided to have a baby together and raise the baby. They have a daughter and the daughter can see just fine, but the hardships they all go through were really tangible and it constantly pulled at my heart strings. The first scene in the movie really sets the tone for the entire movie, you’ll have to watch it to understand but let’s just say I won’t be leaving my rice cooker electrical cables hanging off the side.

Kara Wai and Hugo Ng were really great in their roles as the mother and father, especially Kara as she had the mannerisms mastered in a way that had me convinced she was blind. Even the eye movements were eerily accurate. She is an over-protective mother in a time when there were no mobile phones and blind people didn’t have as many technological advancements we take for granted today, and I just loved her performance. Hugo Ng had an easier time as he had his eyes closed the entire movie, but you can see how he tries to uphold his own sense of self-worth and dignity while trying to earn money for his family. The scenes where the husband and wife interact were very touching and really felt like a couple who had been married and in love for decades.

Karena Ng plays the teenaged daughter and I thought she did a fantastic job in the role. She doesn’t want people knowing she has blind parents in fear of being bullied about it, and she cannot really mingle with her friends properly because of the responsibilities given to her as the seeing daughter of blind parents. The conflicts between these aspects of her life coupled with teenaged hormones made for some intense scenes when it all comes to a head.

Overall, this is a great movie. It won’t be for everybody that’s for sure, but I really loved the family aspect it brings and that genuinely, in the end, family really does matter.

Citeste mai mult

One of the best action HK TV dramas in recent memory

This is one of the best action Hong Kong TV dramas in recent memory to be released by TVB. It is high-octane fast action-packed awesomeness that just made me go "Whoa what?" It starts out with a bang and each episode is entertaining with great funny scenes and some serious ones as well to mix it up with the action.

The stand out here is Kenneth Ma who simply exudes an air of calm and cool even while surrounded by bad guys shooting at him. The cinematography in this drama is just top notch, showing great slo-mo shots displaying character observational skills and strategic thinking, and Kenneth really shines in these scenes. When the main characters team up and fight together in these shots it is simply breathtaking.

As I have only seen 19 episodes I'll leave the complete review off for now, but the one thing I have to raise is how much I hate Natalie Tong's character in this drama. She has clearly been typecast into roles where she is as annoying and obnoxious as possible, but here she is simply unbearably annoying. The story flashes back to how her brother played by Alex Lam gets shot in the knee by Kenneth and it is clear it wasn't Kenneth's fault as you watch it up until episode 19 as there is more to the story than meets the eye, but Natalie is just a plain disgusting bitch towards Kenneth because of how her brother lost his leg after being shot. She started to calm down in the earlier episodes, but suddenly she goes back to being a hateful harlot around episodes 18-19 after insisting on meeting Chinese Hannibal Lecter in prison played by Ruco Chan. I will post a more thorough review once I have seen it all, but right now I just want Natalie Tong to get the crap beaten out of her.

The main theme song isn't very good, a very phoned in performance without any passion in the singing, but luckily the ending credits song is pretty good.

Update after watching episode 20: There is no action in this episode but hot dang it is full of great emotional acting and full of character development. It is still very clichéd and very TVB, but the main cast carry it off amazingly well with the 4 main characters finally all making up and putting all misunderstandings aside. The biggest stand out this episode is Alex Lam as his acting has really come leaps and bounds in this drama. His portrayal of conflict and guilt after remembering what truly happened in getting his knee shot really deserves an award, so I really hope he wins something at the TVB awards at the end of the year. The most wonderful thing to come out of this is that Natalie Tong finally stopped being a massive bitch to Kenneth after she realised she had the wrong idea the entire time, so much so that she didn't know how to face Kenneth after all those years of wrongly being angry at him. I was happy that Kenneth made amends with Joel and the scene where Joel tells Kenneth to punch him as an apology for the misunderstanding was very touching, but what annoyed me was how Joel's character could have come to that conclusion when he and Kenneth were comrade-in-arms so he should have trusted that his bro wouldn't do something as stupid as he originally thought.

Update: Just finished watching it all and boy what a ride. The drama slowed down somewhat around episodes 22-23 and gets a little boring, but pretty soon the main big bad, Ruco Chan, finally unleashes his master plan and gets out of prison, then it gets a lot more interesting. The action never reaches the heights of the earlier episodes, but it is still really cool, especially the gun-fu gun grab fight scenes.

I really liked Ruco's Chinese Hannibal Lecter role here, it is a great change from seeing him as the good guy who usually dies in TVB dramas. Now he is the bad guy... who *SPOILERS* dies in this TVB drama. It is different, but Ruco was an unlikeable person in this role from the start so he did a great job.

The final episode put him up against the two main good guys, Kenneth Ma and Joel Chan, and knowing he was no match against the both of them, busts out a syringe of a drug to help him in his final battle just like in The Righteous Fists, so I knew he was going to die. The director here missed out on an opportunity for a massive final 10 minute boss fight against the 3 of them, pure balls-to-the-wall action, instead the ending of this fight was a little anti-climatic. I was expecting Ruco to bust out a drug-powered Baji Kuen to mess up Kenneth and Joel.

I was very close to giving this drama a lower rating because it was implied that one of the main male leads passed away, but it is all good, we get a happy ending, even for Alex Lam! Alex Lam better win an award for his role here, massively improved!

Citeste mai mult

So far great fun to watch!

Up to Episode 14:

I loved the original Duke of Mount Deer, so this show that brings back all the old characters into a modern day setting was just great! The characters are… let’s say reincarnations of the characters from the old show and the premise is really weird, like how some people get struck by lightning and it reignites memories of their past, but I dig it! It makes no sense but I’m game! i’ve only watched it up to episode 14, but thought I would get some thoughts in.

The show revolves around the 42 chapters, a key to finding the buried treasure that the original series also brought up, but the hunt is still on in the modern day world. I found it quite refreshing to see some gender benders in here, like Siu Bo and Obai being girls in the modern age. Making Katy Kung constantly shave due to being Obai is hilarious and completely makes no sense but I don’t care! It’s just fun!

What I do find very annoying is Kaman King as Siu Bo. It is not the actor I don’t like, but the character she plays. I mean, as a guy it was okay watching Siu Bo be this perverted idiot, but when it is now a girl running around pining for a guy it just feels really cheap for some reason. It kinda got on my nerves a little bit, but luckily the rest of the cast manages to stave off the cringe. Also, the guy she is pining over is Kalok Chow, and his character has serious issues. He constantly scolds and beats Kaman that it becomes essentially domestic abuse. I know they make it out as him being a partial reincarnation of Princess Kin Ning, but man some scenes were a bit too much for my liking.

The biggest cringe moments were the terrible rap scenes. I have not finished this series yet but I hope they stop doing those. They are awful! But so far, most of it is pretty great, especially the scenes with His Majesty, Moses Chan.

Update:

I just completed this drama and yes, it suffers from typical TVB pacing issues where the ending is rushed and some things really do not make a lot of sense so it dragged the overall score down from 8 to 6 for me, but some things I do find quite humorous so I'll leave it at a 6.

It turns out that the guys were not really after the buried treasure, but amongst the treasure were these super medicine pills that could grant great healing and rejuvenation capabilities, even raising the dead back to life. Once I heard this I wondered.... why didn't the Emperors of old just keep these tablets and use them to stay alive longer and rule longer? Why hide this in a treasure vault? Better yet, why not make more? An explanation for this was never given, we just have to accept yes, they exist and they are in the vault.

So the gang finally find where the treasure is and despite having the huge country of China where to find it, the treasure just happens to be found in Hong Kong. Yes, of all places, the legendary buried treasure is in Hong Kong and it happens to conveniently be in the sticks. Zoie Tam and her crew of evil bad guys in white military soldier fatigues - yes they are dressed in white in Hong Kong - tried to blow up the entrance to the treasure but apparently ancient Ching dynasty technology is blast proof. Best part? The entrance was under 2 inches of dirt, so I am amazed that normal rain and wind erosion did not expose it to the world sooner.

Later, the protagonists find the key needed to open the entrance, which reveals a short staircase down into the main vault. All the gold and jewels are there, but the magical medicine of longevity? Oh, that's a long a series of passageways fraught with traps and dangers. Cue the low-budget Indiana Jones tropes and bad CGI, but I found it so bad it was funny so I forgave it.

They finally get the medicine after a few minor characters die and gasp, there are only 3 pills left! A lot of drama later and we get the next treasure hunting trope of escaping from a collapsing chamber because the main treasure has been removed. Everybody gets out and the vault is completely caved in. The vault is never brought up again, but I kept thinking with all the gold and jewels there, why is nobody organising a digging expedition to get down there and remove the treasures? I mean the treasures are a t most 5 metres deep from what we could see. There is millions if not billions of HKD worth of valuables in there!

But there is a plot twist! Kandy Wong was revealed earlier in the drama to be the reincarnation of Chan Gun Nam, Siu Bo's martial arts teacher in their previous life, but it seems in this life they have turned evil and was 150 years old. In the past they managed to take one of the super pills and gained longevity, but the efficacy of the pill was running out and she started turning old, so she needed the medicine in the vault to regain her youthful appearance. The pill also happened to increase her fighting powers as well, so that was two birds with one pill! She manages to fool everybody and steal the pills, taking of of them to heal her affliction and then perform a massive heel turn to become the main antagonist right near the end of the drama. I did not see that coming.

The final battle was pretty cool, with lots of martial arts and fighting, and Kandy being nigh-on upstoppable, but somehow she gets shot to death and forced into the river with the remaining 2 pills. Luckily, Moses managed to grab one of them, but the other dropped into the river. Oh no! Here is where I got quite upset with the ending because it was so rushed. Moses Chan and Katy Kung had no chance to have any real romantic moments in the drama, so at the last episode Moses was going take the pill he grabbed and travel with it to the USA to heal a girl called Ruby (JW) with it. Katy says she would go with him to protect him, and the show does a sudden 2 months fast forward where they are back in Hong Kong and are suddenly a couple. Were we expected to imagine their 2 month developing romance? What the heck? Terrible TVB, just terrible. If you were going to make them a couple, build their relationship earlier in the show, don't just slap it at the end and have the good parts occur offscreen.

But the worst part is final scene. Lisa-Marie Tse appears briefly in this show, probably because it was a contractual obligation as her acting and cantonese is truly awful, and right at the end she brings up the immortal bird to Moses to discuss, which looks like a phoenix. We then cut back to the river where Kandy Wong was killed and where one of the pills fell into the river. A pigeon, yes one of those flying rats, flew into the river using bad CGI and ate the pill. It then flew away and suddenly turned into a giant phoenix shaped bird the size of multiple buildings and then flies over Hong Kong ending the show. Now, that pill fell into the river and was eaten immediately, meaning it was 2 months ago, and yet in that time nobody in Hong Kong saw it or reported on it, and Moses never mentions that it was discussed anywhere in Hong Kong so clearly nobody saw it. Dude, if a bird the size of a football stadium flew overhead, especially in a place with many skyscrapers like Hong Kong, you are going to see it, and then news outlets and social media would have a lot of news about it. Lazy lazy TVB here.

The best thing to come out of this is that the actors that usually play side characters had the chance to shine here as they had a lot more to do than in other dramas. It was great seeing Sunny Dai and Cheng Ka Sang get more screentime to shine here.

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A darn good sci-fi chinese action movie

Man, everybody laughed and said it was too risky when Louis Koo wanted to make this movie, but hot dang it is one of the best - if not the best - chinese sci-fi movies made in recent memory. The special effects do range between convincing to a little awkward in some scenes, but overall this is awesome and full of incredible action set pieces that I would say are near-Hollywood quality. The story is something that we’re already seen before. Humanity has ruined the atmosphere and made the air toxic, and to top it off a meteor falls onto Earth in district B12 and an alien plant life form sprouts from it uncontrollably every so often, threatening life on Earth. Sure, many common tropes are in play here and recycled, but it is done here very well is a roster of huge HK stars to carry it. I had a lot of fun watching it and it is worth rewatching in future for the great action

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I really wanted to like this drama

I really wanted to like this drama but sorry, it is just terrible. Charlene Choi plays JD, a forensic scientist who is great at her job but is completely socially awkward, similar to Temperence Brennan from the US TV series bones, but lacks her sex appeal. The story mixed her into some random stuff that made no sense; it is so contrived I actually felt my head spin.

The male lead is played by Jospeh Chang and he is definitely not a Seeley Booth, in fact he is a hot headed idiot who barely gets anything done right. The two mains have no chemistry at all so I didn’t care what happened between them. Watching Joseph constantly use mandarin to speak to the guys who ALL use canto got really obnoxious because he had no charm to him at all, he is just this hot headed bull that does stupid stuff and occasionally throws bad canto phrases at people. To be honest, I only watched this to the end because of Law Kar Ying, Kenny Wong and Michael Tao, legendary TVB actors. Everybody else was meh.

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I love watching Kent Cheng

This is a comedy drama and I just love watching Kent Cheng in action. He has always been great to watch act, and here in this role he is witty, smart, experienced and really had great comedic timing. He stars as a wealthy business man that has a highly dysfunctional family with a son that won’t listen to him, a girlfriend who he won’t marry and a daughter who hides stuff from him. One of the best scenes was when he finds his daughter, played by Kelly Fu, living in poverty in Hong Kong because she divorced her cheating husband - a husband Kent forced on her - and when Kent finds out he sarcastically replied, “Such a small problem and you never told me?” Just pure gold!

Kent’s quips are also on point, just so sharp and with no hesitation and he doesn’t filter his emotions either. Watching his interaction with each member of the cast is just so funny, especially with Edwin Siu and Archie Sin.

The main driving plot so far is that Kent was abducted and was threatened by his kidnappers to give them money or else. They even threw in a line “someone in your family made us do this”, to which Kent grew suspicious of everybody in his inner circle. Episode 5 brings this plot point to a “conclusion” but Kent is not convinced so this is still the main drive of the plot.

So far a very entertaining drama. I can’t wait for more episodes next week!

Episode 6-12: Kent will a still on top of his game. All the best scenes have him in it and when Edwin Siu is with him and they banter back and forth it is just extra special. The story so far has some twists and turns but as this is a comedy, it doesn’t go too insane. The abduction is now old news and no longer a driving plot point.

The biggest stereotype this drama throws out there was how the IT guy could do everything to do with computing. Hacking, Photoshop, video editing… the IT guy could do it all. And the best part was that he was the ONLY IT guy in the entire company. I know that this is just a comedy so it was done for comedic reasons and as a plot driving device, yet I kept shaking my head at the ridiculousness when everybody went up to him with all problems related to using a computer. This is like expecting a baker to know how to fix an oven when it breaks and how to make a Consommé.

Amy Fan, for now, is by far the most annoying character in the series for me. Damn, her character just sucks. So much nonsense is caused by her and her… secret son? I hope she gets her just desserts.

Episodes 13-17: man I am getting so sick of the love themes in the drama. Edwin Siu and Kelly Fu have a love theme sang by Edwin himself but it is an awful song that sounds like Edwin is trying to summon a demon through a straw. Then we have Archie Sin and Yuki Law who have a romance going in the drama and they also have a love theme that is sang by both of them. The song is a cover of a classic and the both of them butcher it, like just ruin it with their incompetent singing. Both love themes play almost every time the couples are onscreen and when there is a pause during their conversations that it not only becomes predictable but also incredibly annoying. What on earth was the sound producer thinking?

Amy Fan is the girlfriend of Kent in this drama but she keeps acting all chummy and friendly to this guy played by Felix Ng. I’ve waited ages to find out what relationship they have because they act like they were having an affair behind Kent’s back but are never given a chance to explain. Later we get a chance to find out when Kelly asked her what exactly their relationship was, but Amy refused to reveal it saying “what does it matter?” It matters to the viewers dammit! Don’t tell me you are mother and son and it’s “normal” for you guys to act like that? Geez just reveal it already!

One thing that did change for me though was the most annoying character was no longer Amy but Raymond Cho. As the character of the son to Kent, he is rude to employees, feckless and idiotic and doesn’t listen to his father’s wisdom. Instead he made so many stupid decisions that his father had to help him get out of, and later for some stupid reason he teams up with his father’s competitor to teach his father a lesson, even stealing an important document his father could use to defend himself against a false claim of recipe plagiarism. What son would do that purposely to their own father? Wtf? When Kent decided to teach his son a lesson by making him bankrupt I was fully onboard. Raymond can get stuffed! What a stupid character.

Final update: what just happened? I watched the final 3 episodes and I am still getting over how bad the ending is. Yuki Law - as the granddaughter of Kent Cheng but not really - did a sudden heel turn and took over Kent’s business when Kent signed over everything to her as insurance when he went for heart bypass surgery. Yuki took this opportunity to take over the entire company and made huge changes, fired a bunch of people and even took over the main home. Her excuse was that she knew she was not really Kent’s granddaughter since she was 8 and she was only doing what her grandfather taught her.

Suddenly, in the final episode we find out that Yuki was only doing it to teach her grandfather a lesson so he would change and for the family to get back together again because the conflict within was pulling all members apart. Why did she decide to do it all of a sudden? Because - and get this - she was reading an online novel written by some Korean called Harry Park, that just so happened to be about a family in the same situation they were in, so Yuki thought that by following the plot of the novel it would also solve the issues in her family. Wtf? And this somehow works! After Kent finds out about this, he quickly accepted it and all is well. Do you know what a real old cranky Chinese man would do in real life? Curse the granddaughter because that is some BS you don’t do to your family.

I know this is supposed to be a happy ending but come on, this is so contrived and out of left field that it requires effort to write something this bad purposely. If it wasn’t for Kent this drama would be a steaming pile of crap.

And Raymond Cho stilled sucked at the end. Man, his character is so lame.

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An explosive start, this is great!

This sequel drama continues directly from the last drama and it kicks off with a lot of action and awesome stunts! If you wondered where all the budget from “In Bed With A Stranger” went, it all went here to this drama, and you can tell because of all the action and special effects used here.

I have watched up to episode 3 and Ruco Chan is still separated from Rosina Lin, and you can see how pathetic he was trying to get her back. I am calling this now, Rosina is going to start dating this Professor played by Alex Fong later, and then eventually Alex Fong is revealed to have some dark background and connection to the dark web and terrorism so she breaks up with Alex Fong and gets back with Ruco. This is the typical TVB formula so I am calling it now. I really hope Rosina doesn’t stay with Alex because they are not a good match as a couple.

For now, all good!

Episode 9: so far so good but this episode brought in something that had me laughing so hard! The police go into a home and take somebody there down to the station. While at the home, they spot a triangular computer on the floor with all these RGB fans and you can see it is air cooled with what I think was a Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212. While interviewing the suspect for some possible cybercrime, Terence Tung said something that made me laugh so hard. He says to the suspect, “We spotted in your home a PC that appeared to be as fast and as powerful as the police supercomputer.” I’m sorry but has anybody on the TVB production team ever seen a supercomputer? They are a huge mammoth cluster of racks that require a huge datacenter to set up and have running with huge power demands. And TVB expects us to believe something like that, which a Police force should have, was replicated in a single tiny PC case with a single CPU and powered by a single PSU? I know they say PCs run faster with more RGB lights but come on! Maybe the Police supercomputer is really just a single consumer machine running a Ryzen 9 CPU with a ton of RGB fans?

And what I found hilarious was how the guy who was arrested was hinted in being one of the best computer scientists around and worked on an encryption algorithm that had not been deciphered in the drama. Do you wanna bet that guy is also a hacker? There is this strange belief that if someone can do computer science and/or program they are automatically knowledgeable in the arts of hacking.

Episode 14: man this episode made me feel really bad for Ruco Chan, I mean that guy cannot catch a break! We see how pathetic he had been living for the 3 months after breaking up with Rosina with the eating alone at home and the avoiding alcohol thing. I know the Ruco curse is still active so there is a chance he won’t get back with Rosina if TVB are feeling like assholes, but this episode just made me feel so bad for him when Rosina said “sorry but we can’t be friends, let’s just be colleagues” after Ruco went all out and said he would wait for her.

Episode 15: lol wtf? This episode made me laugh so hard. So Crystal’s boyfriend is the super smart Computer Science banking nerd that cops wrongly arrested and funnily said his desktop PC was as powerful as the Police supercomputer. Well in this episode he is helping the cops try to find out who this weird Darkweb guy called Perseus was. He even roped in Crystal to help him do some “hacking” to detect when Perseus would send cryptocurrency to some mercenaries and intercept it. What made me laugh was how Crystal’s Computer genius boyfriend’s reply to every problem the cops raised was “oh yeah I can download some software for that” or “yeah I can get a program for that.” Like dude, ain’t you like some hotshot hacker lord, why are your solutions all off-the-shelf stuff you can buy? What were you planning? Installing Microsoft Office 365 and writing an Excel macro on their supercomputer? What’s extra hilarious was how he requested to use the cops supercomputer to do the processing and the cops were like “sure dude, install your shit on there”. That’s not good practice, and doesn’t he have his own desktop PC supercomputer at home? I'm calling this now. Crystal's boyfriend is going to die. I can feel my TVB trope senses tingling.

Episode 21: man what an episode. So Crystal Fung’s old Venezuelan orphanage friend, played by Sheldon Lo, who we get to know in earlier episodes turned out to be a “bad guy”, but I found myself really supporting him. He was smart, calm, and a great strategist, so much so that he found out his boss was going to double cross him so he found a way to turn it around back on his boss. He is also shown to be a great marksman doing incredible firearms action in this episode. Later, as he was about to escape on a yacht, Ruco catches up and was about to arrest him when these assassins turn up and they are forced to work together to survive. It was a great scene and showed that the guy was not that bad and he really was the anti-hero type and it suited him. He had that handsome look with a rebellious nature about it that suited the anti-hero vibe. Later we find out he escaped to Mexico and joined a new crime syndicate for protection so I got excited that we may see him again, but soon we get a one month flash forward and Crystal is at a church lighting a candle for someone, and it turned out our anti-hero died off screen in a fire fight in Mexico. TVB did our guy dirty, such a great character just unceremoniously killed offscreen. I hope he get more roles like this in future because he was great.

Episode 23: ouch Crystal’s boyfriend is in a coma because he had an allergy reaction to bromide gas. Alex orchestrated the entire thing because the boyfriend was, again, aiding the cops in decrypting Alex’s darkweb messages. This would be quite a blow to the cops EXCEPT our expert computer science genius oursourced a lot of the work to his Decryption Association Group he was a part of as he couldn’t decrypt it on his own. This was so stupid because usually Police would not just easily allow such a thing to occur as it was highly classified work, they would have to interview individuals and have them work at the Station to ensure confidentiality, instead here this guy goes “hey can I send this confidential stuff online to my buddies at the Association to help?” And the cops go “sure dude”. If it was that easy, why even ask the boyfriend to help in the first place? As he is in a coma I am going to say he won’t die because if TVB wanted him to die it would have been immediate.

Episode 24: we finally get to see Alex Fong develop romantic feelings for Rosina after they keep running into each other. Alex, after seeing Rosina holding photos of Ruco and hearing from Crystal how they still have feelings for each other, decide to go the petty pathetic route of attempting to shame Ruco out of his career so he wouldn’t have a chance with Rosina anymore. Like who does that? It is such a childish thing to do. If anything I bet this would bring Ruco and Ruco back together again.

Episode 25: okay so it seems Ruco loses his court battle thanks to the machinations of Alex Fong, this results in Ruco going to prison for 28 months. Ruco going to prison and framed for monetary theft was just heart breaking, but we see the beginnings of Rosina starting break out of her shell and show immense concern for Ruco. Oh man, they are gonna get back together for sure. I was wrong about Rosina and Alex getting together, I’ll admit that and with only 5 episodes left there is a very low possibility of it happening now so my guess now is that Alex is going to get rejected by Rosina and Alex won’t understand why because he is such a childish shithead, then most likely would have her kidnapped because that’s what creeps do. Let’s see.

Final update: man the last 5 episodes were a rollercoaster. We saw how Ruco was exonerated so he was let out of prison along with the experience bringing him and Rosina back together again. This was great! But on the other hand you how really stupid scenes like Jonathan Cheung escaping prison without outside assistance purely by chance. They were transporting him to hospital when suddenly a black dog in the road causes the driver to swerve off and crash and Johnny took the opportunity to escape. That was so unearned and cheap that it felt insulting.

We then get Alex planning all these terrorist stuff and right at the last minute he calls off the plan because - and get this - he discovered love. Wtf?

Right near the end we find out that Johnny had set up a dirty nuclear bomb on the roof of a skyscraper, and that getting too close to it would give the people such high levels of radiation poisoning they would die in 5 minutes. Ruco and Ben have everybody evacuate and then decide who would disarm it with a coin toss. I thought TVB were going to kill off Ruco so the curse was in full effect, but suddenly out of the blue, Alex arrives and says he would disarm the bomb as a way of atonement for his previous actions. Of course, they let him because the main characters can’t die, and Alex deactivates the bomb before succumbing to the radiation. I didn’t care about Alex dying though, the guy killed his dad so when he died I just said, “good”.

The ending was quite a happy one and I am glad Ruco got a happy ending, a proper happy ending, in a serious drama. It is a shame they ruined it with some really silly choices in where the story was going. Overall score is a 7.5 as the silly scenes pulled it down slightly, but still a great rewatch drama for sure.

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