Successor

I'm not sure, but I think this Chinese comedy, for which I never saw a preview, winds up with a four-week run at the Causeway Street multiplex, more or less full schedules all the way through. I never saw a trailer for it, compared to, say Fly Me to the Moon, which I don't think lasted that long despite having a preview in front of nearly every movie I saw for two.

It's apparently been an enormous hit in China, up to around $460M, easily the biggest movie of the summer, and it could possibly catch Lunar New Year movies Pegasus 2 and YOLO if it hangs around until National Day. Sure, China's population is four times that of the USA, but since movie tickets cost about half of what they do here… Well, that's a comedy making about $230M in the States, and I imagine a lot of studios would take that.

Interestingly, all three of those big hits feel like things that could do okay with an American remake; they're solid concepts, but the vibe of all of them is off, so maybe a little localization could help.

Oh, and fair warning: Today's the last day at Causeway Street, so I'm not terribly worried about some spoilers in the review, even though part of what I enjoyed was the surprise of discovering that the description on IMDB was fairly deceptive.


Zhua wa wa (Successor)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #7 (first-run, laser DCP)

It feels strange to have any particular opinion on Successor as part of a body of work, because while a fair number of the movies that the core croup (filmmakers Peng Da-Mo & Yan Fei and stars Shen Teng & Ma Li) and various subsets have made it across the Pacific, I have missed a few and lack context. And yet, I can't think that they've lost something from their early days: They almost seem to be striving for maturity here, compared to when they made Goodbye Mr. Loser and let nothing get in the way of a joke or the general absurdity.

It opens by introducing the audience to Ma Jiye (Xiao Bochen), a bright kid being raised by poor layabout parents Ma Chenggang (Shen Teng) and Chunlan (Ma Li) and also caring for his grandmother (Sa Rina) in a run-down apartment complex that his teacher (Ding Liuyuan) finds quaintly anachronistic compared to the rest of Slinky Town. She has found a sponsor who will allow him to live and work in a better environment, but the parents refuse. After the two leave and Jiye heads to school, we see why, as Chenggang and Chunlan sneak out a secret passage and into an expensive car: Chenggang is a self-made billionaire, but has opted to raise Jiye in the environment that forged him so that he can be a true heir.

Though its targets and intentions are often very different - indeed, almost inverted in terms of where the comedy and drama are to be found - Successor has the same sort of vibe as The Truman Show, a single innocent unaware that the world around him has been carefully constructed, at least until cracks start to develop faster than they can be plastered over. There are kernels of truth that the filmmakers can work with in how obsessive parents can get about both their children's success and for them to repeat their own childhood, all the more so because they are often at cross-purposes. Done right, there's the chance to smuggle in some clever satire underneath the slapstick absurdity.

Instead, though, the two things often blunt each other; the various secret rooms, manufactured coincidences, and double lives often bring chuckles rather than the guffaws that this sort of broad absurdity often managed in previous Teng/Ma comedies, maybe because those two doing ridiculous and selfish things to screw each other over is a lot more fun than them doing it to fool a little kid. That could still work - Xiao Bochen gives Jiye the right sort of wide-eyed combination between naivete and curiosity that works when his parents seem to have good but misguided intentions - but there comes a point where it feels more cruel than funny, but by the time Jiye (now played by Shi Pengyuan) is starting to act on this, it's a hard turn and Peng & Yan don't quite have the heart to make Chenggang a proper villain, or even properly tragic.

Teng knows the job, though, and plays Chenggang as entertainingly off-center enough to keep the movie fun even if the guy is, in all likelihood, kind of awful. Xiao Bochen and Shi Pengyuan make a very solid tag-team as Ma Jiye - Shi really does look like the older version of Xiao on top of maintaining a skewed world view even as tears turn to determination - and they both play very well against Sa Rina as the teacher impersonating Jiye's grandmother and naturally being pulled into the role (she's probably the film's MVP). It feels like they could do a bit more with Ma Li as the mother who did not sign up for this when she married a wealthy man or Zhang Zidong as the older son whom Chenggang deemed unworthy.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good jokes in here and more of them work than don't, although I did sometimes feel that I was laughing at different bits than other folks in the mostly Chinese & Chinese-American audience did. I just have the nagging feeling that I would have laughed much harder if this was played more as a classic Ma/Teng farce that teed the best jokes up one after another rather than something which maybe has a point to make.