1.5/10 “Crazy Rich Asians” is an ugly, mean girl with a ton of beautiful makeup on. Sure, she may look gorgeous and appealing, but take away the makeup and you’ll see how disgusting, hollow and shallow she is. This is a movie that looks beautiful with its fancy cars, mansions, etc. but when you take all that away what you have left is a garbage script and the worst film of 2018 so far. This is the most unoriginal, repetitive, uninspired, cliché movie I have seen in recent memory. Let’s start with the story that is predictable because we have seen it a million times before. Someone of a higher stature or royalty or wealth falls for the commoner. This has been done countless times in cinema from “Cinderella” to “Maid in Manhattan”. But since now the cast is Asian and crazy rich, we are supposed to forget how unoriginal and lazy this story is. How many movies have you seen where a girl tries on dresses in front of her friends and the outfits are comically bad (you should know the outfit will suck before you even put it on) until the very last outfit is the perfect one? It has been done in countless films and since this film can’t conjure up one original scene, has to repeat this tired, overdone, unfunny schtick. How many movies have you seen where a character has to chase down the love of their life to the airport or an airplane right before takeoff so they can confess their undying love and how they want them back? Yep, that tired cliché gets used here too because this movie has no original ideas. Even the beginning of the movie is utterly insulting by how dumb it thinks its audience is. This couple has supposedly been dating for over a year and yet the girl doesn’t know who the guy she is dating is, despite the fact that a simple Google search would tell her everything she needed to know. You are telling me her and none of her friends have ever asked her boyfriend’s full name and then looked him up online or wondered why people react the way they do when they see him or want pictures with or of him? It is a completely asinine plot point. There is then a cartoonish whirling and swirling of colors as people in the film text each other and word about the couple spreads. It might have been interesting if they kept that novelty whenever people texted throughout the movie but since they use the idea once and then abandon it, it just feels out of place and cartoonish. This is also some of the worst direction I have ever seen. Not surprising coming from one of Hollywood’s worst directors, Jon M. Chu, whom has directed such modern day classics as “Step Up 3D”, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”, “Justin Bieber’s Believe” and “Jem and the Holograms”. A big part of film is knowing when to use a song or a film score and when to have silence and just hear characters speak or let the action unfold. Chu has shoved so much music in this movie (particularly the first 45 minutes which I honestly think only has two dialogue scenes without music) that is it like he is afraid of silence and this is a mark of a bad, amateur director. Him and his editor are also extremely lazy for using a shot of the same building seven or eight times in the movie, four times of which were for an establishing shot. As if there are no other buildings in Singapore that they could have shown. This whole movie felt like it was just one big tourist commercial for Singapore and nothing more. They also refer to our female lead as a professor of economics about six times but then they call her a professor of game theory twice. So which one is she? You could say game theory falls into economics I guess but they never even explain it, nor does the lazy script care to. This is also supposed to be a romantic comedy. The romance is there but the comedy? Uh…still trying to find it. Our main girl’s good friend has the most annoying female voice since Fran Drescher and although she was supposed to be the comedic relief, wasn’t funny in the slightest. Her family was also extremely over the top and stupid as her fat brother literally stalks our main female protagonist and takes pictures of her while she is in bed without her consent (#MeToo) and as funny as Ken Jeong is, since this script is as funny as finding out you have cancer, he has nothing to work with and his comedic talents are wasted. I could go on about how the main girl is dumb for getting mad at her boyfriend when his mom and grandma do her wrong or how our main male protagonist’s mom has deep seeded beliefs that she has held her entire life but changes her mind at the end of the film in five minutes because she loses in a game and gets a speech from our female lead but I don’t want this review to feel as long as the movie did. You can say you liked or enjoyed this movie, as people are free to enjoy whatever they’d like but no one can say that this is a good or even mediocre movie because it is just absolutely awful and if you love this movie you need a movie education. I love the “Sharknado” films and enjoy watching them but I recognize that they are poorly made, over the top garbage. “Crazy Rich Asians” is basically the same thing. You can love it or be entertained by it but it is trash. I would honestly rather have Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski back in Hollywood working than give Jon M. Chu one more movie to drag down our IQ with.
#SingaPoorQuality / #LazyBitchAsians / #ChuTheScenery / #MyBigFatChicWedding / #TakeADumplingOnTheAudience / #ShangriYoungMan
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