All's Well, Ends Well 2009 Review (家有囍事2009)

Just got back from the after party for the HK debut of All's Well, Ends Well 2009, aka 家有囍事2009, directed by Vincent Kok and starring Sandra Ng,  Ronald Cheng and Louis Koo.

Its hypothetically the sequel to the classic 1992 "All's Well, Ends Well" and "All's Well Ends Well 1997" New Years films that starred Stephen Chow and the late Leslie Cheung.    But in reality other than featuring Raymond Wong and Sandra Ng,  this film is completely unrelated. Its a pretty wholesome 'sit-com' type comedy...  Sandra Ng plays a hard working, loveless professional woman and  Ronald Cheng plays her younger brother who is doomed to never find true love as long as his sister is unmarried.  He hires 'love doctor' Louis Koo  (basically 'Hitch') to seduce his sister in order to help her overcome her aversion to dating.   Louis ends up falling for another girl and his status as a hired gun is revealed...

....much hilarity ensues!

Like i said, its standard HK comedy type stuff,  but with enough laughs sprinkled in to keep most people entertained.  There are great comedic performances from Sandra and Ronald too!  Louis is pretty good and Raymond Wong pokes enough fun at himself to keep his inclusion as a main actor in the film from being too akward...  :-P

Some of the jokes don't come out quite right in English,  but the HK audiences enjoyed them while I was scratching my head trying to figure out what was going on.  I give it a 7/10 on its own merits as an HK comedy. 

The thing I liked most were the random cameos.  You can see some of them on this page of video clips. Just on the alivenotdead side: 24Herbs (especially Conroy) are in one brief scene,  as are Danny Chan, Barbara Wong and Celina Jade (and I think Vivek too?).  

Oh and then there's Shan Chen and this guy:

...more on that tomorrow! :-P