My 2 cents

Quickie post on a movie I just saw. Fairly new HK flick called "Running on Karma" with Andy Lau and Cecilia Cheung. I'm kinda undecided, but maybe at the end of this review I'll figure out what my real opinion is. So the skinny: Andy Lau is a former, hella-buff monk who decided to not be one anymore after a strange occurance with killing a sparrow on accident. After that incident, he developed a skill to see a person's karma just by looking at them. Cecilia is a rookie cop who is having her tough time trying to be a good cop and happens to run into Dai (Andy L) in a strip joint. Dai took a turn for the worst b/c he could not deal with the consequences of his power to see karma. Now he's an overgrown buff man making a living on doing various buff men activities...(stripping, body building, just having fun with lady friends...) They meet when Cecilia busts the stripping joint for indecent exposure and the movie kinda takes off from there. Throughout the course of the movie, Dai saves Cecilia a few times after seeing a strange image of a Japanese soldier killing many people whenever he looks at her. Eventually Dai figures out that it wasn't that Cecilia needed to save someone from dying, but it was actually Cecilia who would die. Ok, I think I've gone far enough... This movie isn't really a love story (as some may expect from the massive number of them coming out of HK), it's more of a action movie with the religion of Buddhism twisted into it. At the end of the movie, as a viewer, we're are to get a deeper understanding of Buddhism/karma. I guess for the average viewer, they may be left baffled and confused beyond belief since I don't expect them to know anything about Buddhism because that was me when I watched this movie! It took a little bit of explaining from my dad to get why some certain things happened in the film. The movie wasn't really funny at all. The action is fake and Andy Lau's buff suit is even more fake. If you ask me he looked better in his fat suit =X (Love on a Diet was such a good movie XD) Anyway, regardless of the humor and action as most people usually look for, the movie carries itself surprisingly well and delivers its message very nicely. There's a little thinking that needs to be done and you should watch this movie in an understandable language. Don't be like me and watch it in Mandarin w/o subtitles u_u;;; (This was actually my second viewing after being very very confused after the first time; I had to find out what on Earth this was about) I would recommend this movie to anyone who's looking for a movie that isn't just a hollywood fluff and has some actual ideas behind it. Albeit I don't know how many people out there understand Buddhism, but if anyone's got questions about the movie, I'll be more than happy to answer them =D. Thinking about the movie, I think I'll give it a 6.5 / 10 for good deliverance. It was still very hollywood fluff-ish especially in the beginning. No good humor also docks this movie down. Worth it if you're into Andy Lau... and by "into", I mean you're a super-fan or a squirmish girl fan.

posted by Jason @ 11:40 PM