What a Wonderful World
Reviewed by YTSL
Andy Lau playing a dying man (who wants to end
his life on a high -- or at least memorable -- note). Wah Jai trying
to be convincingly earnest and winning. His big nose being oh so prone
to bleed in a quite photogenic manner. The high cheek-boned Cantopop
Sky King shown wearing a trademark white undershirt. If this 1996 Samson
Chiu helmed and co-scripted -- along with Wong Ho Wa and Tang Kit Ming --
effort also had had its star astride a powerful motorcycle, fitted out in
way too tight jeans or leather trousers and in a role of an sometimes insolent
but always honorable Triad, it would have succeeded in incorporating just
about every Andy Lau cliche known to this Hong Kong movie (re)viewer and
possibly made the day of fans of one of the most prolific actor-singers alive.
As it stands though, Andy Lau’s part in WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD is in some
ways a somewhat atypical one for him. Although his San Chung Wah character
is the surely not particularly ambitious movie’s main man in terms of his
being the one with the most screen time, this globe-trotting ace TV reporter
-- who learns that he’s suffering from a potentially fatal disease but refuses
to allow his doctor (a cameo appearance making Kent Cheng) to treat him in
favor of dying on the job (like the photo-journalist who sacrificed himself
by staying on Mount St. Helens to indelibly capture images of the erupting
volcano that a gwailo friend (who comes in the form of Paul Fonoroff) tells
him about) -- actually ends up as the reaction person to two other individuals;
both of whom could be said to be flawed characters yet are shown to have
outlooks on life that make them personalities that (even) a man with more
limited time left on earth than most other people can appreciate and would
do well to learn from plus seek to emulate.
Singapore-based Gump Chung Shan (not the easiest role for the never unlikable
Kenny Bee to essay) first comes to the attention of Wah as the focus of a
sensational news story that the newsman gets the plum assignment to cover.
Like Nick Leeson (whose reckless trading bankrupted the previously venerable
Barings Bank), Shan single-handedly caused widespread chaos to break out
in the financial world after inadvertently making some seriously disastrous
stock brokering decisions. Now wanted by the authorities, he’s gone
into hiding and on the run, and become the sought after prey of a whole slew
of camera-clicking plus tape-recording news hounds as well as potentially
meaner and more dangerous gun-toting cum -wielding individuals.
At some point, Wah not only comes face to face with Shan but is taken hostage
by the desperate individual whose immediate plans do not seem to go beyond
(illegally) crossing into neighboring Malaysia. After successfully
doing so by boarding a train that serves those two countries, the rather
hapless duo manage to get lost in: First, a jungle; and then a vast,
people-free section of a scenic tea plantation. As seems to be the
way in movies (but probably less so real life), the two men find themselves
with plenty of opportunity to talk and become better acquainted with each
other in the couple of days that they are alone -- bar for animals like an
enormous, fat and, fortunately for them, slow-moving python -- in the Malaysian
outdoors. In the process, Shan divulges that “money covered my eyes”,
offers to Wah the maxim that “You own your life. Treasure it or not
is up to you” and -- perhaps most pertinently, for the purposes of this hardly
complexly plotted film -- entrusts his new friend with contacting a woman
he loves, should anything happen to him.
Upon his return to Singapore with an “exclusive” story about Shan, Wah goes
to pay a visit to the truly “happy hooker” who managed to leave a major impression
on Shan despite his having only been with her for a total of four times.
As played by Theresa Lee, Chu doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to Xaviera
Hollander. Instead, she seems to be a cross between Anita Yuen’s energetic
and upbeat “C’est la Vie, Mon Cheri” character, Faye Wong’s “Chungking Express”
sprite and the cute waif the Canadian-Chinese actress essayed in “Love is
Not a Game But a Joke”. Although Chu’s (second) appearance in WHAT
A WONDERFUL WORLD is what effectively sends the movie deep into a highly
improbable realm (many of whose premises -- particularly those that get introduced
in the “jungle” section of this undeniably naive, and sometimes downright
ignorant, work -- are very hard to take seriously, even when one knows that
they’re only there to help move the story along), she -- and the fresh-faced
actress who portrays her -- it is who (also) turns out to be the otherwise
quite mediocre offering’s trump card.
Be it by way of her teaching Wah that situations and things don’t have to
be perfect in order to be wonderful, the goodwill she extended to the many
and diverse group of men who have been her clients or her unorthodox methods
of dealing with sad and other not great feelings, Chu shows herself to be
a genuine gem of a human being -- the kind of individual that one would feel
blessed to know. While her very presence in the movie does not actually
manage to make the whole work into that which I can honestly recommend that
others view, it did offer up the nice notion that, if there exists individuals
like her out there, WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD it could be...
My rating for this film: 5.5