"Mr. Zhai" or "Chase Our Love" a review...

I decided to watch this flic called "Chase Our Love" or "Mr. Zhai" because it was free on demand and I wanted to watch a nice comedy to practice my Cantonese comprehension skills. 

I am actually halfway through watching this movie and I decided to write a review already.  "Why?" you ask?  Because it's 50 minutes into it and I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on in this movie. 

From what I can tell, the plot (if you can call it that) has something to do with video games and a rivalry between guy and girl geeks (The Geek Alliance vs. Single Best Girls).  Most of the guys look like what you would expect geeks to look like, except a few guys that look like hardcore gangsters.   All the girls look like hot models.  The guys want to stay single as long as they can and the girls are all marriage crazy and continually scheme to do whatever they have to in order to the guys out of the house and actually on dates with them. 

This would be an interesting basis for a movie (especially for a video game/anime geek like myself), but the story is told so messily and hap hazardly, that I still can't be sure this is the actual plot of the film.  Like I said before, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on in this movie... and I've been paying attention... and I even rewinded in a few places to try to see if my confusion was the result of missing some important piece of subtitles.

A screenshot from one of the more interesting scenes in the film... although it's a stretch in trying to explain what this scene had to do with anything going in the rest of the film.... sigh

Oh, remember how I said I thought it had something to do with video gamers?... 58 minutes into the movie, they finally show a scene of people actually playing video games.  Sigh...

Positives: 

1. Opening scene has lots of hot girls in one room, in towels and underwear and stuff (That being said, confusion starts from minute one of the film).

2. Opening narration has this cool CGI video game style sequence of an army of guy JRPG characters charging at an army of girl JRPG characters. 

3. There's a scene of the crappiest anime convention I've ever seen, but it is a scene of an anime convention non-the-less.

4. The dialogue is in Cantonese, as opposed to Klingon... I did start watching this to practice my Cantonese comprehension after all.  Actually I take that back.  On looking up more about the film, I found out it was originally recorded in Mandarin and dubbed in Cantonese.  To tell you the truth, they might as well have done the dialogue in Klingon.  It would have been more entertaining and would have still made just as much sense.

Negatives:

Everything.  I don't think this movie was written, directed and produced as much as it was subjected upon the actors and crew.  There's so many characters with so many subplots and weird quirks and so many twists and turns... hold that... no twists and turns, actually.  Just confusion.  It kind of feels like they ad libbed scenes with whoever happened to be on set that day.  Then they had to edit this mess together.  I can only imagine the actors in the movie showing up to the premiere and, themselves, being absolutely confused by what is going on. 

This is an alternate poster for the film... I put it here because this poster is about 1,000 more entertaining and more coherent at telling a story than the film itself.

Although, now that I look at it... I don't think anyone in the poster actually looks like any of the characters in the film... WTF!?

Final thoughts:

The director of this film should be ashamed of himself.