Movie review: CJ7

Starring: Stephen Chow Sing-chi, Xu Jiao, Kitty Zhang Yuqi
Director: Stephen Chow Sing-chi
Category: IIA (Cantonese)

There's something vaguely Chaplinesque about Stephen Chow Sing-chi. Hong Kong's premier comic superstar has always been more than just laughs, possessing an agility and poignancy that elevates his screwball act into another realm.

Like Chaplin, Chow was extremely prolific in his earlier years, with nearly one feature released each month in the early 1990s. Now that he has more control as producer-director-writer-star, shooting schedules have extended to multiple years. This century has so far seen three completed Chow works, one brilliant (Shaolin Soccer), one admirably ambitious if imperfectly realised (Kung Fu Hustle), and his latest, a maudlin miscalculation.

The story of a father and son, CJ7 is a spiritual descendent of Chaplin's The Kid (1921). The plots are totally different but the essentials are the same, mixing laughter and tears to relate the travails of a down-and-out social outcast struggling to be a single parent to a loveable tyke. Unfortunately, CJ7 's laughs are few and far between, and the emotional situations are not developed affectingly enough to fill the gaps.

Part of the problem is, like in Kung Fu Hustle, there's not enough Chow on screen. As Ti, a poverty-stricken construction worker in a mainland metropolis, Chow's character comes in third place.

Of primary importance are Dicky Chow (Xu Jiao), Ti's eight-year-old son, and CJ7, an extraterrestrial creature and Dicky's best friend. The kid and the ET are genuinely engaging but fall short of taking a viewer's mind off the weak scenario (credited to Chow and five co-writers).

Most of the action takes place in three locales: the family's appealingly ramshackle hovel, the vaguely surreal construction site where Ti toils, and Dicky's posh academy. The school is an exclusive institution that Ti has somehow scraped up enough funds for his son to attend, and where the scruffy child is constantly bullied by richer classmates and snobby teachers. An exception is the beauteous Miss Yuen (Kitty Zhang Yuqi).

The overall mood veers between broad, cartoon-like strokes and finer revelatory detailing, the picture never quite integrating the divergent motifs.

CJ7, though, is adorable, with an astonishing range of facial expressions and body language clearly modelled after Chow himself. Equally eloquent is Xu (above, with Chow), who under the director's guidance turns in a performance that is cute without being cloying. So effective, in fact, that if not for the publicity materials, one would not realise the boy is played by a girl.

The dialogue expounds the merit of leading a virtuous life, yet the narrative doesn't display the courage of its ostensible convictions. All the supposed heavies, from the overbearing foreman (Lam Tze-chung) to the gangster-like academy brats, turn out to have hearts of marshmallow when exposed to the innate goodness of Ti and Dicky. And in the end, all problems are solved, not through hard work as repeatedly advocated by Ti, but by the discovery of a magical critter from outer space.

CJ7 may solve the movie-going dilemma of the whole family during the Lunar New Year holidays, but it brings scant cheer to the prospects of Hong Kong cinema in the Year of the Rat.

SCMP Jan, 31 2008