Honey Money Phony

I ask you, and not just because posts with pictures tend to perform better, if this is the optimal way to name this movie:

Understand - I actually really like the title, because I like almost-rhymes as much as the real thing, and it kind of gets across the vibe of what the movie is going for, and I kind of like the old-school "doesn't quite get the nuances of English" vibe of another generation of Chinese movie titles - think Wheels on Meals - but maybe the two together is too much? There are six ways to arrange these three words, and which works the best?

Honey Money Phony
Honey Phony Money
Money Honey Phony
Money Phony Honey
Phony Honey Money
Phony Money Honey

I'm not going to get out the "English adjectives go in this order but we're never specifically taught it" post out, but most of these sound vaguely wrong except Money Honey Phony and Phony Honey Money. It probably comes from the Chinese title - "骗骗喜欢你" transliterated as "Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni" and (according to Google) translated to "Lie, Lie, Like You" having something like "Honey" in it. Three-quarters clever, but stumbly.

Anyway, it had the odd New Year's Eve opening, which is apparently a thing in China, perhaps particularly with romances, with probably the most (in)famous being Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was promoted with special screenings timed so the on-screen couple would kiss at exactly midnight and presumably all the lovers in the audience would join in, only to find they'd walked into a long, slow-moving art-house picture with a half-hour oner you needed to put 3D glasses on for, and audiences haaaaaaated being fooled like that. Last year, If You Were the One 3 came out a few days before New Year's Eve and it kind of played weird, with the traditional Chinese New Year postscript despite coming out for Western New Year's, and I wonder if it was also synched to midnight for some shows. Heck, i wonder if Honey Money Phony was at Causeway Street; I don't recall whether they were open late or closed early.

Oh, and one last thing - I was cheered to see the logo for Da Peng's company before the movie, and didn't realize that he was producing it. It turns out to be the directorial debut of his regular co-writer, although the script is credited to someone else. The vibe is similar but not quite the same, and it's interesting that Da Peng has a credit as "Supervisor" right up with the writer and director credits, and I'm kind of curious what that means. Super hands-on line producer? Shadow director? Chilling on set because the studio doesn't trust the first-time director? It's a category I've seen a fair amount on Hong Kong films and animation, and I wonder how different the workflow/division of labor is.


Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni (Honey Money Phony)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it when it's out of theaters

Is this getting a bonus quarter-star for Jin Chen's crush-worthiness? Yeah, probably. When you get down to it, it's neither a terribly clever con artist movie or a terribly romantic romantic comedy. But the cast counts for a lot on this sort of feather-light feature, and they make their characters a fun two-hour hang even though the outcome is never really in doubt. It's pleasant, which can be a back-handed compliment for a movie even if it's often what the audience wants.

Jin plays Lin Qinglang, a single 29-year-old woman who has a salaried job at an insurance company but also does side jobs, gig work, and a monetized vlog because her ex-boyfriend Zhang Zijun (Wang Hao) grifted 200,000 yuan (about $27,000) from her before casting her aside. She's wise enough to recognize when Ouyang Hui (Sunny Sun Yang) is posing as a customer service rep for her video host and turn the tables, convincing him to help her steal her money back. He agrees, but his plan will require a couple of accomplices - Dong Xiaohui (Li Xueqin), an aspiring actress and auto-bump scammer that Qinglang knows from work and Ouyang's mentor Bo Shitong (David Wang Yaoqing) - and will need to net 600K to break even.

honey Money Phony seldom gets the big belly laugh despite its jokes often being broad and always feeling like the filmmakers are about to take a big swing (there's an article to be written about about movies that use countdowns as a crutch rather than making the events feel pressing), but it gets a steady stream of chuckles, and probably more than I recognize because they're based on Mandarin wordplay and what may be an untranslated text gag about folks being punished for their crimes toward the end. The folks in the audience who spoke the language were laughing enough for me to take their word for it at points. The movie is full of funny set-ups that end in a decent punchline but seldom snowball, which is fine, and occasionally finds a little barb to stick the audience with, like Qinglang's self-aware narration describing her cheerful and eccentric videos.

The narration doesn't go on that long because director Su Biao and writer Yang Yuting want the audience to feel Qinglang's can-do optimism more than cynical reflection; from the start, it's fairly clear that she has reacted to getting scammed by reading up on them but not necessarily building defenses against them. Jin Chen plays her a couple steps removed from Manic Pixie Dream Girl status - she's been through enough that she doesn't quite have that energy - but she's cute as heck and charismatic enough with that to keep the movie her story even when the other characters are more active participants in the scams and being given moving backstories.

The rest of the cast around her is playing some sort of oddball or another, even if it's muted: Sunny Sun's Ouyang is the secretly sad one, Wang Hao's Zijun is malicious, Li Xueqin's Xiaohui is the performer, David Wang's Shitong the veteran who never quite fit into normal society, with Song Muzi a one-joke character for how much he spits when he talks. That's pretty much fine, for the most part - there's enough to Ouyang to make him an interesting romantic interest for Qinglang, and most of the rest are fun but no threat to make the movie scattered. Sometimes the movie doesn't quite know what to do with Zijun, especially when they hint that he's got enough skills as a con artist himself to see through things but not doing much with it.

One thing that I kind of like about the film, at least as an idea, is how the filmmakers eschew certain staples, in that they never put Qinglang in a tight dress and made her seduce someone, or otherwise go in for elaborate disguises and transformations. Qinglang, like most of the characters, really, is kind of a dork, and even when she's lying and scamming alongside the others, it's by letting her eccentricity and vulnerability out rather than faking something. By and large the movie world rather have the team triumph by being who they are rather than otherwise, even if giving the actors a bunch of alternate personae is where the jokes usually are in this genre.

It's a risky trade-off, and I'm not sure it always works. The earnestness is nice, but the movie could really use a moment or two when the audience can really erupt in laughter or marvel at how slyly the filmmakers have misdirected them for the previous couple hours. I laughed a bit and liked the group, but think i still would have liked them if I laughed more.