Love Undercover
Director: Joe Ma
Year: 2002
Rating: 6.0/7.5
After being a successful singer for years, all
of a sudden Miriam Yeung has popped up in a number of Hong Kong comedies portraying
the average ordinary middle class HK working girl to good effect. Though
her acting style reminds me of Sammi Cheng without the sizzle, she has nevertheless
quickly garnered a fair amount of popularity and box office success. In some
ways this flurry of films – Feel 100% II, Dummy Mommy Without a Baby, Love
Undercover and Dry Wood Fierce Fire – is akin to an alley cat having a litter
of kittens under your bed – they may be very cute and cuddly but a part of
you wants to drown them in a deep well.
Love Undercover doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. It is so round and
cuddly that there isn't an edge in sight. If you smacked it in the face it
would just mumble an apology and walk away. Everyone in the film acts like
a stuffed toy that would gladly hug you like a frisky fundamentalist minister
in the middle of a born again baptism. The fact that most of the characters
in the film are either police or triad related doesn’t matter – everyone
is as cute as a Hello Kitty drinking mug with no malice in their hearts.
Another premise that the film seems to have is that being cute makes you
as dumb as a stone – the cops are a bunch of fall over their feet fumblers
but their triad quarry is too thick to even recognize a keystone cop when
they trip over one. You have to wonder how the cops ever catch a criminal
or how a criminal ever catches a break.
This doesn’t mean that this film is not funny – in fact it is fairly amusing
in that sit-com “Friends” sort of way where everything is worked out by the
end and everyone has a group hug. Of course if all the cast members of "Friends”
were to fall into a burning lava pit I would not lose any sleep over it.
Mixed into the comedy is a tepid (but cute of course) romance that generates
less heat than a frozen twinkie and is even less believable than most boy
meets girl scenarios. This is how it goes.
Miriam comes in at the bottom of her police cadet class and is put into the
Lost Property division where she doesn’t really seem all that unhappy. She
is chosen by Hui Siu-hung for an undercover assignment because as he puts
it “She has no family, no lover, not even a dog and looks faithful and stupid”.
Miriam just hopes that the assignment will be over by Mahjong time. The assignment
– to pretend to be a waitress and place a bottle of Ketchup with a listening
device on the table of a suspected triad moneyman – Daniel Wu. Instead she
manages to get bashed over the head with the bottle by his girlfriend and
then refuses his offer of money.
A waitress refusing a tip? This should have been his first tip off
that something was wrong but he misses this clue as he does many more to
come. Instead he is so impressed with her character that he woos her and
they begin to fall in love – sort of like City on Fire without the gun to
the head standoff. Well maybe not. The film keeps a nice constant genial
level of humor but it could have used a lot more bite to make it more than
passing 90-minutes of being tickled by goose feather. Showing up as well
are Joe Lee as the bodyguard with the itchy trigger finger – no make that
an itchy nipple actually, Wyman Wong as her baldish friend and Raymond Wong
as the good looking cop with the black and blue testicles.
Geez, I feel so grouchy for ever so slightly knocking a film that Mother
Teresa would have given her stamp of approval on – ok so she might not have
completely understood that oral sex joke – but I am feeling a bit low today
after my brief encounter with a squirrel yesterday. I came home to find a
large furry tailed squirrel ensconced on my living room windowsill living
the good life and perhaps hoping to hear some Bollywood tunes. At first she
seemed happy for the company, but after a “meet cute” beginning we spent
much of the next hour chasing each other around the apartment – first me
chasing her – then her chasing me – there was electricity in the air - but
just as I thought we were heading towards a traditional happy ending she
took a leap out of my fourth floor window and hit the patio furniture below
with a loud crash and I haven’t seen her since. Runaway Squirrel. I hope
she is all right and remembers me. Undercover Love could have used a squirrel.
I wonder if Miriam can land upright on a patio table from four floors up.
I'd like to find out.
My rating for this film: 6.0
And now for something completely different!
Reviewed by YTSL
Before anything else, here’s stating that I don’t
know how to account for Brian and my coming to have the different perspectives
that we do with regards to this Joe Ma helmed and co-scripted -- along with
Chan Wing-Shun -- movie...bar for our possibly having gone into a viewing
of it with conflicting expectations re what we would be getting out of it.
For my part, although I had read that LOVE UNDERCOVER won the 2002 Udine
(Italy) Far East Film Festival Audience Award (by having garnered a higher
viewer approval rating than such as South Korean box office hits like “Friend”
and “My Sassy Girl”), I didn’t have particular major hopes for it being a
great work. One reason for this stems from my having been not all that
impressed by Miriam Yeung -- who some people have accused of being a Sammi
Cheng clone (or worse, actually unsuccessful imitator) -- in the one previous
movie of hers that I had checked out (“Dummy Mommy Without a Baby”).
Another was that, post being underwhelmed by “Marry a Rich Man” (the recent
Chinese New Year period’s commercial champion that may have caused my opinion
of Sammi Cheng to swing from very positive to much less so), this (re)viewer
had begun to wonder whether she had had her fill of Hong Kong romantic comedies
On the face of my reaction to this agreeably light hearted Ivy Kong production
though, it would appear that I haven’t yet reached a saturation point after
all. IMHO, it did greatly help my enjoyment of the film that I thought
that Miriam Yeung was a real trip as this particular incarnation of L. K.
Fong (a name which had been given to her “Dummy Mommy Without a Baby” as
well as LOVE UNDERCOVER character) who additionally answers to the title
of PC 11661. Indeed, right from the early moments in the movie during
which her never too cutesy character showed how terrible a shot she was at
the academy shooting range, then klutzily knee-ed a senior police officer
in the groin, all the way past her seemingly lame -- but nevertheless successful
-- attempts at seducing the physically attractive suspected criminal played
by Daniel Wu (who has never looked cuter than when he was hugging the cuddly
toy that had been formerly owned by the woman who his character loved), I
reckon that its star actress comfortably shone in this consistently funny
as well as amiable offering that’s filled with its share of eccentric characters
and zany situations (along with spy cameras plus Keystone Cop-type plainclothes
police officers).
My rating for the film: 7.5