Protégé De
La Rose Noire
Reviewed by YTSL
When I looked at the females involved in making
this 2004 installment of the “Hak Mui Gwai” story which has the super heroine
and her protégés battling against the evil Poison Ivy and
her Ivy League, my expectations rose pretty high. After all, its
co-helmer Barbara Wong Chun-Chun’s two previous directorial offerings (“Women’s
Private Parts” and “Truth or Dare: 6th Floor Rear Flat”) have been commendably
creative as well as entertaining. Additionally, Teresa Mo -- who
has the Black Rose role in this comedy -- is an established comic actress
I was glad to see return from self-imposed exile in Canada four years ago.
And then there are the Twins: a pair of actually biologically unrelated
individuals who both are more than capable of being little rays of sunshine
in films that might have been dreary if not for their presence (cf. “The
Twins Effect” and also “Summer Breeze of Love”).
Admittedly though, two of the main men associated
with PROTÉGÉ DE LA ROSE NOIRE didn’t inspire comparable confidence
and enthusiasm on my part. Alternatively, I do believe that Ekin
Cheng does tend to get an overly disproportionate amount of barbs from
(overseas) Hong Kong movie fans; and especially in view of the singer-actor
having rather admirably attempted to widen his range in recent years by
appearing in comedies rather than sticking to crime -- and more specifically,
triad -- dramas. As for the other favorite “hate figure” that is
this effort’s action director: Well, I had liked “The Twins Effect”, and
Donnie Yen did action direct it, didn’t he? Besides, I must admit
to having trusted that Barbara Wong (whose 2003 work has gotten her a HKFA
Best New/Young Director nomination) would get more say behind the cameras
than the Yen man the way that I knew that Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung
-- even if not Teresa Mo -- would get more screen time than Ekin.
When I saw the opening credits for PROTÉGÉ
DE LA ROSE NOIRE however, my heart sank somewhat. For there, amidst
the cute images that appeared in the movie’s introductory segment, was
the announcement that Donnie Yen was the senior director on board the production.
Also, as the work progressed, further confirmation of this fact came along
in the form of its having well choreographed action scenes -- some of which
feature Mr. Yen’s film debut-making younger sister, Chris (as a character
obviously inspired by Chiaki Kuriyama’s “Kill Bill” appearance) -- that
couldn’t help but steal the show from its often quite lame comedy segments,
and seemingly at the expense of plot continuity.
While great action is a good thing, the fact of
the matter is that its very existence cannot save a film if it is supposed
to be primarily a comedy. And lest there be any doubt, PROTÉGÉ
DE LA ROSE NOIRE -- an effort which has Charlene Choi playing a character
who might or might not be an alien (from outer space, as opposed to, say,
Mainland China), Gillian Chung as a young woman who gets all violent when
hearing her full name getting uttered, and Ekin Cheng as a chatty taxi
driver named Lo Tai (which, when inverted, becomes Tai Lo...) who gets
sucked into the Twins’ adventures that began with their answering a mysterious
job ad that turns out to have been created by the Black Rose -- is supposed
to be a comic offering. Accordingly, much of it -- including a scene
where the off-the-rocker Black Rose forces Lo Tai to painfully pick roses
that were stuck to their thorn-encrusted stems for her with his mouth --
clearly is devoted to trying to elicit laughs, chuckles and such like from
its audience.
But, of course, whether PROTÉGÉ
DE LA ROSE NOIRE’s attempts at comedy were successful is another matter
altogether. And much as I would have liked for it to have been otherwise,
my feeling is that most of them fell terribly flat. To add insult
to injury, even those that got me chortling were ones that came across
as silly as well as mere single note sight gags (like Ekin dressed up to
look like Batman’s Robin and Teresa Mo’s long hair showing the effects
of her having been hanged upside down for a time) rather than instances
that were funny in a way that smacks of true comic genius. To sum
it up then: What a disappointing movie this turned out to be; and so much
so that if the personalities who headlined it are not going to lose their
fans, their next work really ought to be far better than this.
My rating for the film: 4.