JUNE 27 — June is starting to look like a month of sequels (and remakes), which sort of makes sense considering it’s the start of the summer season for movies.
With movies being both business (for most people) and art (for some people), sequels at least guarantee a built-in audience of people who loved the original movie, giving them a higher chance of scoring good numbers at the box office based on the assumption that people who have seen the original movie (or previous sequels) would be flocking into the cinemas to see the sequel, at the very least out of casual curiosity, if not absolute fandom.
With Jurassic World, Minions and Insidious 3 already in cinemas this month, we’re getting two more sequels this week with the arrival of Ted 2, Seth MacFarlane’s follow-up to his surprise 2012 smash Ted (US$549 million or RM2 billion in worldwide box-office) and SPL 2, arriving almost 10 years after SPL first turned Donnie Yen from a has-been into an international action star almost overnight in 2005.
Unlike a lot of other “serious” film fans, I don’t have a built-in suspicion for sequels, no matter how blatant the cashing-in process may be from the outset as can be evidenced by the sequels’ trailers and advertising campaigns. My non-hierarchical approach to evaluating films requires me to give every single film an equal, non-prejudiced chance.
Having really loved the original Ted, which I thought was 2012’s most consistently laugh-out-loud hilarious movie, Ted 2 of course has a lot to live up to. While superficially Ted 2 retains the brilliant potty mouth of Ted, it’s somewhat a lot less sweeter and a lot more laboured this time around, probably because writer-director (and voice of Ted) Seth MacFarlane is a bit out of his depth trying to make a comedy with a thinly-disguised civil rights bent.
As the trailers, posters and the “legalize Ted” hashtags promoting the movie more than makes clear, the story this time revolves around the fact that a government oversight that has only now come into focus basically threatens to derail Ted’s life as he is not recognised as a “person” but only as “property” in the eyes of the law.
Not only are he and wife Tammi’s efforts to adopt a baby (because erm... teddy bears aren’t “equipped” to make one) are declined, but even their marriage is annulled and Ted is even fired from his job as technically his employers cannot legally employ a property.
While the jokes are still hilariously filthy in a lot of places, there’s an uncomfortable whiff of desperation to the whole enterprise this time around as the uneasy blend of MacFarlane’s scattershot approach to comedy with the supposedly heart-tugging (but more like sermonising) civil rights angle has resulted in a film that never quite gels as a whole.
The same, however, can never be said about SPL 2. On the surface it looks like a sequel only in name as Donnie Yen is nowhere to be seen here and it even tells a wholly different story with totally different characters.
But philosophically, SPL 2 is very much a sequel as the original’s title SPL is the abbreviated names of three stars in Chinese astrology (Sha, Po and Lang) that signify destruction, conflict and greed, and this sequel again plays with this concept of coincidence and destiny only with a different story, which makes it something rare in the realm of sequels as it’s not your usual sequel in story and character but a sequel in spirit and philosophy.
Only Simon Yam and Wu Jing (who plays the knife-wielding and white-suited villain in the original) are returning cast members from the original (playing different characters of course), with Thai action star Tony Jaa, Louis Koo and Zhang Jin joining them.
With a plot spanning two countries (Hong Kong and Thailand) and with at least four languages being spoken (as it also involves a group of Korean villains), it has all the ingredients to be a convoluted mess but never becomes one thanks to director Soi Cheang and editor David Richardson’s very deft handling of the narrative’s multiple plot strands and highly-unlikely coincidences that can only happen in movies.
There are echoes aplenty of elements from the original film like terminal illnesses, endangered children and main characters being thrown out of windows, but no matter how intricate the plot may be, Soi Cheang knows that he’s still making a full-on fight flick, and following the new benchmark set by The Raid movies, he stunningly delivers some of the year’s most intense, brutal and beautifully choreographed (both in bodily movement and camera movements!) fight scenes as he fully takes advantage of Jing, Jaa and Jin’s superb abilities as martial artists.
An incredible prison riot almost matches The Raid 2: Berandal’s jaw-dropping prison riot sequence with some truly impressive camera movements and ultra-tight editing (not to mention the fights themselves) and the climactic fight between Jin’s villain against Jaa and Jing’s two heroes easily tops even Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung’s climactic fight in the original. If action movie poetry is your thing, you owe it to yourself to see SPL 2, it really is that good.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
