Advertisement
Review | Love at First Lie movie review: Patrick Kong romance starring Edward Chen and Mandy Tam offers passable entertainment, until things get awkward
- Patrick Kong’s film about Mandy Tam’s working-class girl who falls for Edward Chen’s rich young man starts as a passable watch despite some juvenile moments
- Tam and Chen’s performances help the movie along, but then things take an awkward turn in a final act during which the protagonists’ actions make no sense
Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
2/5 stars
Patrick Kong Pak-leung made his first film under the name Yip Lim-sum in 2004. It says as much about the dearth of directors making romantic comedies in Hong Kong as it does his target audience’s unsophisticated tastes that he is still getting to write, direct and produce his own features 20 years later.
While Kong may have shed his reputation as one of the city’s most critically derided filmmakers in recent years, there is often an immaturity to his characters and a crudeness to his narrative construction – as is again apparent in this latest effort.
A modern-day Cinderella story – like his 2020 film You Are the One – set around a working-class neighbourhood in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok, Love at First Lie makes up for its lacklustre central romance and some laughably juvenile moments with a refreshing cast that includes a few of the city’s more promising new actors.
Following her supporting turn in last year’s Yum Investigation, model Mandy Tam Man-huen takes on her first leading role as Bo, a high-school graduate who falls for a rich and handsome young man, Edward (Taiwanese actor Edward Chen Hao-sen, best known for the gay romance Your Name Engraved Herein), over one eventful summer.
Advertisement