It was a pretty good crowd for a Cantonese-language film on a Wednesday night, and though I liked rather than loved it, I'm also tempted to bump my opinion up a bit because there were folks behind me laughing in moments when I wasn't even entirely aware that jokes were being told. Maybe a lot of these jokes just land better in Cantonese, or call upon context that I, as a guy who just goes to movies and visited the place once, mostly hitting the touristy stuff, just don't have.
Afterward, I did chuckle a bit at a post on Bluesky talking about how part of what's nice is that it mostly keeps the metaphor for Hong Kong as subtext, because it seems like every movie that comes out of the Special Administrative Region is seen as a metaphor for it and its history/relationship to the larger China. I can sort of see it in this case, and I suspect that it's true for a lot of movies - if your movie is not going to be very HK-specific, there are literally over a billion incentives to cast mainland actors and shoot in Putonghua Mandarin to the north - but I also kind of imagine filmmaker Jack Ng sighing, saying he was just trying to tell a funny story.
Night King (夜王)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
I learned about the Hong Kong Lunar Year Comedy as a genre - that is, a broad, mostly family-friendly farce that often ends with the cast breaking the fourth wall to wish the audience a happy new year - just about as it was more or less going extinct. Now, it seems, the Hong Kong film industry has contracted enough that a movie like Night King - pretty entertaining but not quite that sort of thing - gets that slot. And I didn't think it at the time, but it's kind of ironic that the movie spends a fair amount of time talking about the end of an era and how the next generation wants kind-of-similar entertainment.
East Tsim Sha Tsui was the center of Hong Kong nightlife in the 1980s and 1990s, but now the clubs have dispersed around Hong Kong, and one of its longest-standing managers, Foon Kwan (Dayo Wong Chi-Wah) is running the last outpost in East TST, the EJ Entertainment hostess club, aided by assistant "Turf" (Alan Yeung Wai-Lun) and two "mama-sans", Mimi (Fish Liew) and Coco (Louise Wong Dan-Ni). They're short-staffed as the film starts, because their freelance girls have been poached by "Madame V" Koo (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man), who manages the clubs run by the Muses company… And who divorced Foon ten years ago. When EJ's owner dies, his widow sells to Muses, putting Madame V in charge and ready to replace most of Foon's girls with low-paid foreign/Mainland ringers. The thing is, she doesn't realize just how much her boss's son "Prince Fung" (Lo Chun-Yip) hates her, and has rigged the sale to bankrupt her and EJ.
This is hardly the first movie that sort of flips the script such that the fun-loving older couple fall (back) in love while trying to save their neighborhood club from the young businessmen, but it does feel kind of oddly re-aligned, especially since the narration from the start implies that saving EJ will still be kind of a last gasp, and it actually feels like it could be set pre-2020, in that there's no talk of Covid hurting this sort of social club or shots of phone or cars that might fix a more specific moment in time (the Asian Financial Crisis is mentioned, maybe as something more recent than it is today). It's not really important, I suppose, though as an outsider I have a bit of trouble getting a grip on the changes the city/district/business is going through: It's a Hong Kong (and Macau) devoid of westerners, though there's talk of people leaving for America, an influx of pretty Mainland girls who don't speak Cantonese (and who are called "foreigners"), and hints that Vietnam may become southeast Asia's new hot spot. It's a bit odd, to me, since recent Hong Kong movies have often been specific enough about the time and place they're grounded in to give even folks like me a sense of the identity characters are trying to hold on to.
It doesn't really matter, much, although it might make the run at the end when Foon, V, and company are trying to outwit Fung a bit more fun, as well as help flesh the girls out more. They're a lively group but kind of under-baked, a bunch of pretty faces with reduplicative names and comic flaws tossed out too quickly to attach them to names and faces or have them become recurring jokes. It would be kind of nice to nail down just how prostitution-adjacent these jobs are, too, considering that the last act has Coco and Mimi catching customers' eyes and how they seem to love Foon despite his beating them early on. The gags about running this sort of club are generally pretty good, at least, with Yeung Wai-Lun easily walking off with every scene he's in.
The heart of the film, however, is Dayo Wong and Sammi Cheng, who spark from the first time we see them cross paths even though we can easily imagine what led to them divorcing ten years earlier even if the filmmakers never explicitly tell us. They contrive three or four different reasons to throw these characters together and we're happy with all of them, because there's a fondness and history between them that sharpens and softens their rivalry as need be, and all the beats hit right. Dayo Wong has carved himself a nice niche as this sort of well-intentioned but kind of hapless guy, while Sammi Cheng is a superstar who excels as women who shine bright despite their foibles.
They're so good together here that it can throw off the rest of the movie; it's kind of hard to see Foon & V flirting and then have to believe that Mimi in Foon's bed is more than just a casual hookup, even though Fish Liew does her part. The movie winds up having to conclude a lot more business than reuniting Foon and V, and nothing else is quite as satisfying as that part.
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