Asian Beauty Appreciation

Karmic Mahjong (2006) stars Francis Ng and Cherrie Ying (she was the reason I rented the film) as the attractive leads in this comedy (maybe) / thriller (maybe not) set in Chengdu, China.

Ng plays a loser mechanic, Wu Yu-chuan, who has disappointed his wife sexually, who runs afoul of a gang of thieves who have a car smuggling racket, and is being given some bad advice by a blind fortune teller.

Ying plays a good looking woman, Jia Jia, who sold her son to a gangster, but tells people he was kidnapped, and now is desperate to get him back. She too consults the fortune teller.

Can these two people who have seemingly run out of luck and are both beset by the ‘villians’ in their lives, find a way to leave all their bad luck behind them by teaming up?

That’s your premise for Karmic Mahjong which really doesn’t have a lot to do with mahjong.

Francis Ng who is talented enough to have played heroes, villians, losers and lovers in his long film career does his best with what he has been given to work with by director and screenplay writer Guang-li Wang.

Ying, while playing a barely sympathetic role, has been given short shrift in the script. Most of the juiciest scenes in the film involve Ng’s wife, Ling, played by Jing Liang (below). She appears in the only two sex scenes in the film.

The fortune teller is called Blind Liu and is played by Yiu Li-wei (above) who seemingly is guiding the lives of almost all the characters in the film. He is able to make his forecasts after he smells, tastes, and feels (though in some cases he’s trying to grope a female client). He is the comedic reference in the film. While he’s often spouting pseudo-profundities as advice, we, before any of the main characters in the film do so, see him as a charlatan, a fraud, and a horny goat.

The highlight of the film is when Ling tells Blind Liu, “If all the rest of the men in the entire country were impotent or helpless, I still wouldn’t sleep with you!”

So the director has presented us with a set-up that might be compared, at least theoretically, with Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train. In this film, Ng and Ying meet in a car accident and then again on a tour boat.

Ng’s character conceives a plan for them to rid themselves of their respective problems by each killing the other’s problem person. But that’s as far as it goes in a comparison. I’ve seen Strangers On a Train, and Guang-li Wang is no Alfred Hitchcock.

This film lacks a deft touch, is devoid of real suspense or thrills, and takes awhile to get going. However, as you can see from some of the images, the director has an excellent sense of shot composition and can frame a pretty picture.

So you will be watching a visually attractive movie. But unfortunately the film as a whole is less than the sum of it’s parts.

Available for rental from Netflix and Blockbuster or you can purchase from assorted vendors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, HKFlix, YesAsia, and Play-Asia.