'Killer Not Stupid' struggles to entertain.
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After dominating the Singapore box office for two decades, actor-director Jack Neo has ventured overseas - to Taiwan, in fact - to make his first foreign film and in an entirely new genre, the action comedy. The results are decidedly mixed.
The film opened with a rain-drenched fight scene between lead character Hornet (Jay Shih) and an unnamed assassin (Maxi Lim). The intermittently slow-mo fight scene would have been passably okay were it not for the numerous rip-off shots from the opening fight scene of Wong Kar-Wai’s wuxia epic The Grandmaster.
Hornet, who is part of his mother’s agency of assassins, has decided to quit, angering his mother (Taiwanese actress Mei-Hsiu Lin) who decided to hunt down and kill her son, partly also because he holds in his possession an item called the “100K”, a highly encrypted thumb drive that contains the secret identities of assassins throughout the world.
Together with his partner Mark (Na Dou), the duo tries to escape whilst being hunted by not just Hornet’s mother but also by another gang (whose leader is played by Ryan Lian). They encounter Talia (Amber An), the whimsy pink-haired goddaughter of a drug lord, and her no-nonsense bodyguard Ira (Apple Chan) as well as Mark’s former classmate Sha Bao (Gadrick Chin) who develops a crush on Talia.
For a movie that styles itself as an action comedy, the action sequences are sloppily staged and edited. Whatever tension and excitement from watching the movie quickly fizzles out. The same goes for the comedy, done in Neo’s usually loud and slapstick manner, which quickly wears itself out.
The silver lining is actress Apple Chan, who gives a committed and intense performance, executing her stunts with seeming ease and grace. She commands any scene she’s in, outshining her fellow actors. ‘Killer Not Stupid’ is watchable only when Chan is in it. There is undoubtedly a budding action star in Chan and we look forward to her next role.
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