Life Without Principle
There are some good ideas knocking around in Hong Kong genre auteur Johnnie To’s multi-strand financial crisis dramedy- but they’re swamped by an inept script that keeps getting bogged down in details and forgetting the big dramatic picture. The film does have the merit of rendering, with a certain ironic detachment, the human side of the profits and losses generated by stock-market meltdown in a money-oriented urban hothouse like Hong Kong. But that doesn’t make it any less of a frustrating viewing experience.
Bank employee Teresa (Denise Ho) is under pressure from her boss to make enough sales in bank investment products to make up for the month, failure to do so would imply in her dismissal. She frantically tries to sell her investment products to every customer that walks into the door, finally succeeding in persuading an elderly women (So Hang Shuen) to invest her life savings in a high risk investment fund despite being assessed as a low risk investor, however Teresa is soon troubled by guilt as the stock market goes for freefall…..
Another story thread revolves around Panther, a righteous gang member who engages in stock market speculation with Lung (Phillip Keung) but end up with a 30 million blackhole. Desperate to make a comeback in the freefalling stockmarket they decide to rob the loan shark Yuen (Lo Hoi Pang).
The last and also somewhat weaker storyline involves Connie’s (Myolie Wu) frustration with his fiance Cheung Ching fong’s (Richie Ren) reluctance to invest in a multi-million dollar property that they apparently cannot afford.
source form: chinesemoviefan
