Let me start of this review by telling a joke someone told my mum who re-told it to me. She said that in Singapore, we worship three gods. We worship
Kuan Yin (Goddess of Mercy),
Kuan Kung (God of War) and Kuan Yew (aka
Lee Kuan Yew, currently the Minister Mentor and often considered the father of modern Singapore).
If you're not Singaporean or if you don't know who Kuan Yin, Kuan Gong or Lee Kuan Yew are, you will most likely not find this joke terribly amusing. So what does this have to do with Singaporean director
Jack Neo's latest film,
Just Follow Law? Well, this kind of humour abounds in this film and it owes its success in part because this kind of humour gives this film a distinctly Singaporean feel and an instant rapport with Singaporeans in general.
As usual, I won't bother giving you a synopsis of the plot as they can be found at these websites
Just Follow Law official website and
movieXclusive and I don't particularly like writing synopsis.
The basic storyline is actually rather cliche and the
Freaky Friday body switching plot device is old. But luckily for us, even though Neo does use the fish-out-of-water situation to create humour, his insistence on casting
Fann Wong as the lead female really paid off. Fann is one of the top actresses in Singapore and has been known internationally since her role in
Shanghai Knights. While Fann is no stranger to exaggerated comedy, she has never been in a raunchier role than this one and while she does get some mileage from the shock of seeing her being so crude after Lim Teng Zui (played by
Gurmit Singh) ends up in her body, one should not take away from her how well she played this role. Fann is genuinely funny here. Kudos too to Gurmit and the rest of the support cast who are comprised of veteran TV comedians/actors like Moses Lim, Lina Ng,
Brandon Wong and others who's names I don't know or escape me at the moment.
This time Neo chose to make a satire on the civil service and bureaucracy in Singapore and he gets a lot of it right. While bureaucracy is often as inflexible and full of red tape everywhere, Neo's decidedly Singaporean spin on things is what sets this apart. Here's one example of his inventiveness in incorporating Singaporean slang and a slant on things. The bureaucracy in Singapore is particularly fond of the "black & white". In
Singlish, this means that everything you do must be backed up in writing and in this day and age, it means you have to have a copy of it in an email. I know this quite intimately actually. I don't work in the civil service but even in the corporate world, I've been advised time and again to make sure I have the "black & white" to "cover my backside". His use of the CG arrows to illustrate how the word "
arrow" is used in Singlish is also quite funny.
Now I'm not a big Jack Neo fan and I feel that many of his films are deeply flawed and that Neo often lets too much of his Mediacorp Channel 8 television roots show through in his film making. But even though I'm often critical of several of his efforts, even his much lauded
I Not Stupid, one thing I've never disagreed with is that Neo has an uncanny ability to reach out and connect with the masses in Singapore. And Neo has done it once again and surprising, at least for me, has actually quite perceptibly made several advancements in his film-making.
Like several of his previous films,
Just Follow Law can be criticized for glossing over the issues and does suffer from a few common flaws that seem to plague Neo's films, still Neo seems to have learnt a little from his previous mistakes. Unlike his previous films, I think Neo has learnt to be a little more balanced. Previously, in films like
I Not Stupid, I felt that Neo in his eagerness to not only express the pressures children can face in Singapore's education system and also to use it as an analogy of our paternalistic government completely forgot to give the teachers' side of the story.
Also, aside from his little poke about the
James Gomez issue, Neo chose to steer clear of too many political jokes in this film. This was what I felt was one of the flaws in
Homerun. While his jokes about the water issue between Singapore and Malaysia were quite amusing, he did take it a little too far, to a point I felt that it was beginning to detract from the story.
Homerun also suffered from Neo's bad habit of over-using melodrama and although there are some moments of melodrama in
Just Follow Law, kept them to a minimum and Fann and Gurmit took care to play them subtlety enough that they didn't overwhelm the whole movie.
Neo also has a tendency to do too much preaching in his films and it was his cop-out moralistic ending which killed
The Best Bet for me. While
Just Follow Law does do a certain amount of moralising, it is without Neo's usual heavy-handedness and he tempers it in such a way that it is sometimes amsuing and occasionally touching at moments. This I also put down to Fann's, Gurmit's, Brandon Wong's, Suhaimi Yusof's and the woman who play's Tanya Chew's mother's acting.
While this will in no way be a classic and this film is unlikely to win any film awards, still it is worth a watch in the theatre. And if one is looking for a light-hearted movie to begin the Year of the Pig with a laugh, then I wholeheartedly recommend
Just Follow Law, especially if you're Singaporean. And if one isn't Singaporean, you might still find this film amusing as the jokes about the civil service and bureacracy in general probably rings true in other parts of the world.
Right, it's Chinese New Year's Eve and I'm off to get ready for the traditional Reunion Dinner. Have a Happy New Year guys and may the coming Year of the Pig give you many blessings. =)
