From Vegas To Macau II
Wong Jing
The story: Chow Yun Fat returns as Ken in From Vegas To Macau II, but otherwise, most of the cast has changed. DOA remains the big bad organisation. Its accountant Mark (Nick Cheung) has absconded with US$10 billion (S$13.5 billion) and everyone is after him. Ken’s disciple (Shawn Yue) is now with the police and his old flame (Carina Lau) suddenly shows up in his life again.

12 Golden Ducks
Matt Chow
The story: Future (Sandra Ng) used to be a wildly popular gigolo, but he fell into a funk after getting scammed. He is down and out in Thailand, but his former teacher (Anthony Wong) convinces him to return to Hong Kong and get his groove back.

There is a whiff of something in the air as Chinese New Year draws near. It is deja vu, not goat.
Last year’s festive offerings from Hong Kong included gambling comedy From Vegas To Macau and sex comedy Golden Chickensss. From Vegas To Macau hit the jackpot here and was the No. 2 Asian title, earning $2 million.
Both were enjoyable romps.
In From Vegas To Macau, Chow played master gambler Ken, who is roped in by the police to bring down the money- laundering mastermind of the criminal syndicate DOA.
Golden Chickensss starred Sandra Ng, reprising her role in Golden Chicken (2002) and Golden Chicken 2 (2003) as plucky prostitute Kam.
The new instalments feel more tired than inspired though.
It does not really matter if you did not watch the first From Vegas To Macau as plot and continuity have never been film-maker Wong Jing’s strong suit anyway. His comedies are usually thin on story and are just an excuse to see big-name stars engaging in tomfoolery.
In this regard, Chow gamely delivers. He mopes like a peacock with his pride wounded when his old flame resurfaces with a new man in tow. And then he manages to land in a ring with a Thai kickboxing champ.
Cheung matches him in the silly stakes by appearing in one scene with chocolate dripping from his mouth. He is also paired with a young daughter who steals a few scenes with her cute antics.
There are also some laughs, courtesy of Ken’s robot butler who mouths off in a strong mainland-Chinese accent, presumably to greater effect in the original Cantonese.
To up the stakes in the sequel, Wong has piled on chases and firepower action in Thailand and on board a plane when it would have been more profitable to focus on the comedy.
While 12 Golden Ducks is not exactly a sequel, it is spun off from the Golden Chicken series in which Ng played a working girl with a heart of gold. In Cantonese, chicken is slang for prostitute and duck is the male equivalent.
This time, instead of oversized boobs, she sports a manly chest complete with sculpted abs as the gigolo Future. The promising teaser trailer had Ng impressing a black man at the urinals with “his” impressive endowment.
But it turns out that the prosthetic manly chest is a one-note gimmick that quickly wears thin. It does not help that despite the light fuzz above the lip and thicker eyebrows, Ng looks more like a butch female than a handsome man.
Ivana Wong, so hilarious as a bucktoothed newbie hooker in Golden Chickensss, has less to do here as a Thai-speaking tai tai.
Even though director Matt Chow has packed the movie with many cameos – Louis Koo is a personal trainer who has to endure getting groped by women, Nicholas Tse is a successful entrepreneur who had a crush on Future and Joey Yung is, um, a woman who performs a dance for a charity show – the jokes are more misses than hits; the movie simply is not as much fun as its predecessors.
Crucially, Hong Kong is missing from the movie. The Golden Chicken movies were very much about the indomitable spirit of the territory and its people. Without it, 12 Golden Ducks is just a bland dish.
(ST)