CJ7

[Beat TG]

Dicky (played by Xu Jiao) is a boy who lives with his father Ti (played by Stephen Chow), who is very poor and works at a construction site and has no mother due to the latter's suddenly death long time ago, and is studying very hard to get somewhere in life and eventually support his father. Dicky has no friends and is bullied by his classmates for being poor and inferior in comparison but is highly looked up by a female teacher named Yuen (played Kitty Zhang Yugi) who admires Dicky's way of showing off his integrity and good morals of being a kid. One day in school, he sees one of his rival classmates playing with a toy called CJ1 that has been very popular among kids. This makes Dicky so eager that he urges Ti to buy one for him but Ti persists that he can't afford it until his next pay but Dicky won't listen to him and gets hard-headed, ending up getting bet up by Ti for not obeying him. Fortunately for both, Dicky runs into Yuen who happens to be nearby and talks sense to him and calming him down for Ti. Later on, Ti visits a location, where he usually collects junk for his son, trying to find some nice shoes for him when he accidentally triggers a spaceship without knowing, which flies away like nothing happened and leaves an unknown object which Ti takes with him. Ti then convinces Dicky that he has found something that's superior to CJ1 but at first Dicky don't believe him, but then has a second thought and decides to see what Ti is up to. He finds out that Ti has placed an object, the unknown object, at his window. He takes the object and from there on incredible and strange things happens to Dicky once the object comes in great use to him that would change his life forever.

Despite the negative responses given to CJ7, primarily due to its content (family elements, relatively tame for Stephen Chow's standards, not his style etc), I found myself laughing, enjoying, and, at times, felt sad while watching the movie. I'll agree though that this came kind of unexpected from Chow as he usually isn't into family oriented or emotional (to most degrees anyway) movies because the talent, obviously, lies on his comedy acting. But hey, who said people can't change? As time went on, Chow (since his big break in movies) changed his style the more he got involved with behind-the-scenes stuff and once he got more control over his roles (according to the big Chow fans divided into three phases of styles throughout his career). This might usually be quite risky for a career move but at the same time that's what I think it great because there's just so many movies that I can't stand because the filmmakers, producers, actors, companies remain the same conceptually and will ever cream out stuff that's I find tiring, uninspirational and overall crap (this goes mostly for the action genre as nothing new rarely changes action-aside, with a few exceptions though); it's simply different and goes against the stereotype. Here, Chow goes for something different and while its elements are still clichéd and used before in general, for Chow personally it's new and fresh. He took one hell of a risk and it shows (like I said) but to me he succeeds delivering the goods.

As you might know, Chow gets the first billing in the credits again (and from the press) but the true main character of the piece is kid girl Xu Jiao (yep, a girl playing a boy role!) as the hard-studying boy who made a promise to reach high from the low ranks to be successful and support his poor father. As this is a family oriented movie, this means there's lots of humor, sadness, enjoy, anger and so forth and these stuff are executed the way it should be in such a movie but for a kid actress, Jiao carries off her role to great effect and come off being very convincing (mostly) which was all-round nice to experience. Stephen Chow is no downer here either. He portrays the father role flawlessly, but this time around doesn't get to show much humor as he passed those on to Jiao to handle with. But one of the things he showcases that he's otherwise great at (rarely discussed too unfortunately) is his dramatic range as an actor, shifting between different emotions when it's necessary, adding touches here and there and that's good to have. This is overall a different yet great performance by Chow which should (or at least deserves to) be given credit for. The leading actress of the movie, Kitty Zhang Yugi, was an eye-catcher as well. I've never seen her in movies before and whoever she is, she sure was wisely cast for her role as the teacher who ends up caring for Dicky and his poor father and handles it quite decent for being a movie debut. And she's very pretty too which should be enough for the viewer to care for her character as well as her general performance. Also present in the movie are a few actors seen in Chow's previous movies; Lam Chi-Chung (as Chow's boss), and Fung Min-Hang (as Xu Jiao's teacher), as well as some actors (including the other kid actors) and all of them were also good and added extra spice making the movie moody, amusing and so on enough.

Stephen Chow once again delivers with CJ7, despite the drastically changed decisions and efforts he has taken just to make a piece, with the simple intention to entertain and positively affect people. Overall, judge for yourselves: live with it or leave it!

Rating: 8/10

[EvaUnit02]

Duplicate thread, bro.

[Beat TG]

my bad.