Fridae

In the heyday of 1980s Hong Kong cinema when the industry was awash with funny money from the mob on one hand and excess liquidity from international financial speculators on the other, Wong Jing was a name to be feared. Not that he made great comedies but that somehow, he made good money and box office from his lame and downright tasteless comedies. Of course, it took the Wayans brothers (Scary Movie et al) to make me realise that Wong Jing was their missing secret brother, whose movies were so much more deliberately tasteless and lame it makes the Wayans brothers look like the Marx brothers.

I hear that since the Hong Kong film industry deflated, Wong Jing’s made a respectable name for himself in the mainland as a director for hire. He’s still not a great filmmaker but he’s a far better technical director than he used to be – and Treasure Inn can be seen as a showcase of the skills he’s picked up in the past decade and a half.

The wuxia farce concerns itself with a murder mystery, a stolen treasure, and a showdown between the law enforcement and a criminal gang at an inn at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The wuxia elements and scenes in Treasure Inn are technically sound and done straight. In fact, if you took out all the silly scenes, crude jokes, and non sequiturs, Treasure Inn might have been a Justice Dee movie or even a chop suey neo-western, given how Wong Jing attempts with some measure of success to cash in on the current Chinese cinematic craze for the neo-western.

But since Wong Jing is Wong Jing, there will be silly scenes, crude jokes, and non sequiturs where actors either break character to look like idiots or break the fourth wall to make some lame jokes. That’s not to say that Treasure Inn is bad. As the Wayans brothers have proven, there are people who appreciate their brand of humour. The only thing is age seems to have mellowed the director down; his jokes these days are less crass and tasteless and more droll.