Ren zai jiong tu: Tai jiong

Sadly, this is another lame movie that passes for popular in China. It's disappointing to see that Wang Baoqing has a knack for playing a painfully annoying character; Wang is pretty good at being an ordinary guy in indie movies, i.e. the amazing Blind Shaft. Here, Wang is cartoonishly destructive and annoying, and armed with a cactus. He's supposed to be a hapless idiot, but really he seems to want to be an injurious nincompoop.

The boss is another character that seems outlandish to me, but maybe less so to Chinese audiences. I find it hard to fathom someone so stiff and smarmy. Compared to these wackos, Xu is too straight. Perhaps it's that I'm American, but I can't see past this. With good Chinese independent films, there is little lost in translation; it's a smack of reality. With this movie, I can't seem to enjoy Chinese-style wacky comedy.