Mighty Baby

Rating: 5/10
Year: 2002
Genre: Comedy
Director: Patrick Leung, Chan Hing-Kar
Cast: Lau Ching-Wan, Louis Koo, Gigi Leung, Cecilia Cheung, Rosamund Kwan, Carina Lau

Mighty Baby is produced by the same crew of its original version La Brassiere. With the addition of Cecilia Cheung and Rosamund Kwan, The cast is even more extravagant than before. However, sadly speaking, the script of this film is far more inferior than its predecessor, making it a less meaningful film than expected.

The story of the film starts off following the end of La Brassiere, Johnny (Lau Ching-Wan) and Wayne (Louis Koo) is assigned to a new design job by their superior Carina Lau. They have to work with three girls in the office, that are played by Cecilia Cheung, Gigi Leung and Rosamund Kwan, and a bunch of lovely babies. As usual, through the collaboration in the office, romance arises among all these people.

What makes La Brassiere successful are the highly humorous gags and contents. In this regard, Patrick Leung and Chan Hing-Kar did not really disappoint us this time. There are a lot more gags in this film, although some of them are forced humors, overall speaking, the quality of the jokes is not that bad. Yet, everybody has a different sense of humor, whether you enjoy the jokes in the film or not is a very subjective matter. To me, some of the gags work, some don't. Some scenes seem to be prolonged, for instance, the scene when Chapman To imitates Andy Lau during the BBQ party is quite meaningless, the Middle Age fencing scene is not as funny as expected too.

The biggest problem of this film is the script, which seems like a very loosely written piece of work. I am not sure if the scriptwriters were writing under pressure or time constraint, almost all the events in this film are not connected very well. Each scene is a like a fragmented short episode of a single event, they just don't work together as a whole. Moreover, the love plots among Louis Koo, Cecilia Cheung and Gigi Leung, and that between Lau Ching-Wan and Rosamund Kwan lack delineations. Especially the part of Lau and Kwan, their love affair is not persuasive at all, the filmmakers definitely fail to spend enough time to let their relationship develop. In short, all the love relationships just seem very hasty and comical.

In terms of the cast, Lau Ching-Wan, again, proves that he is a very good comedy actor. His humorous performance is unbeatable in this film. His partner Rosamund Kwan is also superb. Kwan's image is always linked to nobility, it is the first time she has totally converted her image into some goon-like secretary character. Unfortunately, as compared to the focus of the film, the trio relationship among Louis Koo, Cecilia Cheung and Gigi Leung, both Lau and Kwan share only a small portion of screen time. By that I do not mean Koo, Cheung and Leung are bad actors, in fact, their performance is quite impressive too. What I think is, if the filmmakers could delete some prolonged and meaningless jokes and spend more time on Lau and Kwan, the film would absolutely look more interesting and fruitful.

Mighty Baby is an entertaining film. Nevertheless, it is in no way comparable to La Brassiere. Perhaps La Brassiere is not a masterpiece, yet it is still able to bring up some peculiar perspectives about the relationship of the two genders. It provides an interesting study of the interaction between male and female. Compared to that, the plot of Mighty Baby is quite hollow. Apart from bringing us some laughters, I really couldn't figure out any redeeming value from it.

VCD (US version) - The US special version released by Taiseng is not too bad. After several disappointing VCD releases of films like Summer Breeze of Love, you can see that the image and sound qualities of their VCD are improving gradually. They are also trying to insert some special features on most of their VCDs, for instance, in this film, a short "making of" documentary is included.

Cool guy(s) - Lau Ching-Wan

Reviewed by: Kantorates