Weighed down by too much of everything

Review: THE LION MEN (PG)/130 minutes/Opens Thursday/

The story: Supreme (Tosh Zhang) is the two-time global lion dance champion, but he is frustrated that he is not allowed to modernise the traditional folk art form.

After he and his Tiger Crane troupe buddies get into a public brawl with a rival troupe, his mentor, Master He (Chen Tianwen), expels him and promotes Mikey (Wang Weiliang) to be the new leader.

Supreme starts his own troupe which meshes lion dance with hip-hop moves and acrobatic cheerleading stunts. Supreme and Mikey fall in love with the same girl, hip-hop dancer Xiao Yu (Eva Cheng), who happens to be Master He's daughter. They also go head-to-head at a tournament.

 

The shrewdest thing director Jack Neo has done in his new movie is to centre it on lion dancing, a theme that is a natural fit for the Chinese New Year period.

Given this, and the fact that he has an excellent track record during the festive season, it probably means another commercial success for him, although its appeal here would not be as wide as the two-part national service drama Ah Boys To Men (2012, 2013).

The Lion Men's only other positive is the director's intention to highlight the oft-neglected folk art form. He is right to point out in the movie that lion dance is under-rated and its practitioners are too often slighted as school dropouts and troublemakers.

But his awful melange of genres (comedy, drama, romance, action) and his inept handling of lion dance action sequences do the traditional martial-art dance an injustice that is more egregious than if he had left it alone. For one thing, he portrays without irony the common misconception of lion dance troupe members as street thugs (whether these Ah Bengs redeem themselves in the second part remains to be seen).

Worse, his fusion of lion dance with hip-hop and cheerleading is about as gorgeous as the worst Miss Singapore- Universe national costumes - it is tacky, inorganic and completely unconvincing.

The most enthusiastic Chingay parade fans will find the fusion-confusion a horrendous mess - which is a pity because the breakbeats in hip-hop have so much in common with lion dance rhythms.

All that is wrong with Neo's slapdash meshing of lion dance, hip-hop and cheerleading is all that is wrong with his approach to film-making.

As he reaches for ever more ambitious themes - he even tries to take on the superhero movie genre here - he exposes his inability to adequately manage each different genre, let alone all of them at once in the same movie.

The romance between Supreme and Xiao Yu proceeds faster than a TV commercial and so lacks authenticity (never mind a bak choy washing scene that is likely inspired by the pottery-making scene in the 1990 movie Ghost).

The clunkily edited and choreographed lion dance action fails to make your heart thump; even the normally majestic lion dance drums are not banged here with sufficient conviction.

And even as Neo fails in those areas, he mostly fails too at what he was once good at - comedy. Despite not being the most original comedian even in his heyday, he at least used to deliver corny and familiar jokes with effervescence, generating laughs by the bucketloads on TV and in some of his earlier movies such as I Not Stupid (2002).

Here, as he strives to be a proper director of epic movies, he reduces his joke-making to the use of bawdy Singlish, lusty Chinese dialect and broken Mandarin. Along the way, he transforms Chen Tianwen from a critically acclaimed performer in Ilo Ilo (2013) to an over-the-top cartoon figure.

Rising above the movie are Tosh Zhang and Wang Weiliang, who do well to take ownership of their respective cliched roles of swaggering alpha-male and lovable hangdog loser.

While they do not exactly roar in the face of such a cliched script, their lively performances ensure that they will not be mauled by critics like the movie almost certainly will be.

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