Judgment Day
Ong Kuo Sin
There is nothing like impending doom to put things in perspective.
With 72 hours to go before a meteorite wipes out Earth, priorities are straightened and secrets start spilling out faster than worms crawling out of the woodwork.
Family man Fu-an (Henry Thia) announces to his wife and children that he wants to be a woman; a cop (Jeffrey Wang) confesses to his colleague (Mark Lee) that he took a bribe many years ago; Shuzhen (Alice Ko) tells her husband (Tender Huang) that she has fallen for her superior (Guo Liang); and Rebecca (Rebecca Lim) chooses to go to Cambodia instead of accepting a marriage proposal from Richard (Chua Enlai).
After a promising set-up, writer-director Ong Kuo Sin has no idea what to do with the various stories, which mostly get neatly resolved with a Big Speech moment.
And because there are so many threads and characters, the treatment of the material inevitably feels glib and clumsy.
Judgment Day also features the late John Cheng, better known as Ah Nan, as a temple medium who knows how to bend with the wind. He has some interesting observations about religion, but too bad the scene concocted for him to share them is completely contrived.
(ST)