Conmen in Vegas
Director: Wong Jing
Year: 1999
Rating: 6.5
Wong Jing and Andy
Lau return in the sequel to their film Conman. Its recipe is similar to the
first one – part comedy, part gambling, part action and part con – though
the focus is much more on the comedy this time around. And as in any good
Wong Jing film, it is inundated with a bevy of curvaceous and seductive women.
For the most part this is an enjoyable and very silly film that is as light
as air and about as filling. In the last third it begins to run out of gas
and ideas and one gets the feeling that Wong Jing is frantically looking
for filler – primarily consisting of poisonous snakes biting bottoms – to
make it to the ninety-minute mark.
At the end of the previous film, Lau had
ended up with Athena Chu – but they quickly jettison her with a “she dumped
you because you’re too old for her” comment from his friend Nick Cheung.
Great – that had been my favorite part about that film – that an old geezer
like Andy could end up with Athena ! At least its more humane than
the way Austin Powers gets rid of Elizabeth Hurley in his sequel – Athena
is no fembot.
The pair of Lau and Cheung has added a third
party to their gambling/con man team. This is Natalis Chan and his presence
in a film always guarantees a fair share of idiotic female cleavage comedy
and they certainly come through in this regard. In their first con,
the three of them take a triad boss for a load of money and they are later
happily carousing around a pool with more bikini clad females than you will
see in a Miss Universe contest when the boss comes after them.
Natalis and Lau escape, but Cheung is captured
and the boss demands HK$30mm as ransom or Cheung will start losing his body
parts. At the same time, the authorities from the Mainland come to Lau with
a proposition that he help them recover both the money and the guy who cheated
them out of billions of dollars. The catch is the fellow is living in Las
Vegas. So off they go to Vegas to try and scam him out of his money and put
him on a plane back to China. Much of the film was apparently shot in Caesar's
Palace.
They end up getting the assistance of an adult film director – Wong Jing
playing the same character he did in the first film – and two seemingly bubble
headed girls from Taiwan who are looking for a rich catch. They all
work together in trying to bring the bad guy down. I can’t say any of their
schemes were particularly clever, but often amusing.
Wong Jing in his never-ending attempt to discover
his new “Chingmy Yau” introduces three lovely actresses in the film. The two
gold diggers from Taiwan are Yuk Fong with the vast cleavage and Kelly Lam
who can unthread a man’s shirt buttons with her teeth. Nice work, but I would
actually prefer a woman that could sew a button on with her teeth! Both are
nice on the eyes, but Chingmy Yau they are not. Chingmy could have added
about 20 degrees of heat and many more laughs to a few of those scenes.
The woman I was most impressed by was Lei Fei who plays the girlfriend of
the bad guy. She has one scene in which she displays some very nice acrobatic
moves and she has the looks and a sneer that makes her a candidate for some
“girls with guns” roles. I am always on the lookout for some new female stars
that could kick start that genre again.
Don’t expect a lot, but there are a number of small very humorous moments
that keeps the film afloat and makes it a quick mindless 90-minutes.
