We Not Naughty
Jack Neo
The story: Polytechnic students Weijie (Shawn Lee) and Jianren (Joshua Ang) are best friends who are sucked into the world of loansharks. New teacher CK (Daniel Chan) is determined to be there for them. However, he unwittingly helps the boys to create a remote-controlled flying machine, called Ah Long No. 2, for which the bad guys have more nefarious uses than just collecting debts.

Local film-maker Jack Neo is a familiar fixture when it comes to the Chinese New Year box-office sweepstakes. His past entries have included Love Matters (2009), Ah Long Pte Ltd (2008), Just Follow Law (2007) and I Not Stupid Too (2006), stretching all the way back to 1999’s Liang Po Po – The Movie.
We Not Naughty, his latest festive entry, is also familiarly unpalatable.
For starters, director and co-writer Neo tackles way too many issues here.
Apart from the topical loansharking plot, Weijie’s younger sister (Cheryl Yeo) learns about the real-life consequences of Internet bullying the hard way, his younger brother (Ivan Lo) struggles with being good, and gambling debts lead to an explosive confrontation between his father (Jacky Chin) and mother (Xiang Yun). And that is just Weijie’s family.
Jianren has a mother, Cynthia Phua (Dawn Gan), who is more interested in her career than her family, and an Americanised younger brother (Amos Yee) who looks down on his elder sibling.
There is also teacher CK’s attempts to bond with his students and an ill-conceived bet in which the loser has to run through the school naked.
Predictably, Neo ends up making not a cohesive social drama but a scattershot series of skits with much moralising. His messages are as subtle as having a ton of bricks dropped on one’s head before being totalled by a steamroller.
Pointed digs about foreigners taking over HDB estates and loansharks following gerrymandered electoral boundaries are essentially punchlines in these skits, not political satire.
Shawn Lee and Joshua Ang are the most natural among the younger bunch of actors and they have a chemistry that dates back to Neo’s I Not Stupid (2002). But the poignancy of two frustrated teenagers left with few choices is almost buried with everything that is going on.
And then a theme song blares: “We are a group of hopeless people, bound to get hurt and fall sooner or later/No one will care whose responsibility this is, we are just like drifting motes of dust.” Obvious much?
The characters rarely feel like flesh-and-blood creations. And because they do not, moments of forgiveness and redemption, underscored by sad-sounding musical cues, are mawkish, not moving.
In the final half-hour or so of this overlong movie, Neo decides he has had enough of social drama and puts on his action director hat instead.
So all the major characters are willy-nilly assembled in a jungle setting: Weijie and Jianren with their remote-controlled flying device, the blustery bad guys, the feckless and reckless CK and his heavily pregnant wife in pursuit and the maddeningly upbeat Madam Phua who manages to find her way into the melee as well.
The payoff? One of the most ludicrous and unnecessary birth scenes committed to film. There was a point about the bond between mothers and their children, but I had long since hitched a ride on the steamroller out of there.
(ST)