HOME RUN review

Chapman To's workrate over the past few years seems positively relaxed compared to many well-known Hong Kong actors – while his name's become a minor draw for some time now he seems content to pick and choose his scripts. Last year's mainland co-production [i]Home Run[/i] saw his first comedy starring role since 2005's [i]Moonlight in Tokyo[/i] – did To knock this one out of the park? Review after the break.

It takes a lot for a child actor to really carry a movie. Most directors want them to show some degree of maturity beyond what an average child their age would generally be capable of. Too much, however, and they risk coming across as precocious, annoying, a mouthpiece for a scriptwriter who has no idea how children actually behave. Fang Gang Liang places the success of [i]Home Run[/i] square on the back of his young star. Not an unexpected decision; the mainland director drew considerable attention on the festival circuit with [i]The Story of Xiao Yan[/i] in 2006, much of the praise coming from juries specifically focused on films aimed at or concerning children.

[i]Home Run[/i] has nothing to do with baseball, surprisingly. It begins with Li (Fan Bingbing, [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/shinjuku-incident-review/][i]Shinjuku Incident[/i][/url], [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/a-battle-of-wits-on-dvd/][i]A Battle of Wits[/i][/url]), a host on a daytime television show – entitled [i]Home Run[/i] – which supposedly plants a child in the middle of Shanghai to see if they can find their way home. Ratings have long since hit rock bottom (for some reason), so when their latest prospective star isn't living up to expectations and the show faces cancellation, Li grabs the one child she can safely lay hands on – five-year-old Lu (child actor Zou Yanwen) – and thrusts him in front of the cameras. Complications ensue, not only because Lu turns out to be rather more difficult to control than Li bargained for but also since she's neglected to inform the boy's father (Chapman To, [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/review-of-lady-cop-and-papa-crook/][i]Lady Cop and Papa Crook[/i][/url], [url=https://screenanarchy.com/site/view/parking-review/][i]Parking[/i][/url]). This results in Li struggling to keep the live broadcast on track while Lu continually thwarts her attempts to get him to stick to the script, repeatedly phoning his father for advice on whatever the crew want him to do.

The premise feels strained enough inside the first quarter of an hour or so. Would such a show really get commissioned by any television station in the world? Either way, it's quickly evident the filmmakers were more concerned with the comic potential and the underlying messages they could pitch. Even from the opening scene, the moment the score kicks in – too bright, too quirky, too saccharine – it becomes difficult to shake the impression this is one more glib, facetious narrative tailored specifically for the cute kid [i]du jour[/i]. Every subsequent piece of character development seems to reinforce this idea. Li is the stereotypical career woman, lashing out at everyone around her by way of a defence mechanism; Chapman To's kindly dentist is the absent-minded obsessive [i]par excellence[/i], a walking bundle of neuroses dripping with flopsweat; Lu is a shopping list of moral talking-points and mild slapstick routines designed to trigger every maternal impulse in the audience and then some.

All the principals feel more like cartoons than living, breathing people, Lu most of all. Zou Yanwen is obviously a talented young actor, but five years old or not he simply doesn't have the presence or general charisma to make anything out of a script that reels off hackneyed riffs on kids-say-the-darndest-things at a rate of knots, or a score that rarely misses the opportunity to throw in a comedy sound effect. He drops his trousers on camera! He urinates in public! He massages a woman's breasts! Technically the film is far from terrible, the cinematography and editing professional enough, if workmanlike, but the spark needed to elevate this tired material above mediocrity simply isn't there.

Which would be excusable to a degree if the film wasn't so obviously trying to say something worthy with it. Some of the ideas in the script show flashes of inspiration, such as the psychologist brought on the show to analyse Lu's clowning, yet even these are rooted in such well-worn tropes they barely raise a smile. The narrative seems content to take lazy potshots at the usual suspects, reality television, investigative journalism, celebrity culture and so on yet it doesn't seem particularly bothered about doing much with them beyond the general preaching about social mores common to all too many uninspired mainland productions.

Not only does the film charge along oblivious to how little resemblance it bears to reality, it seems happy enough to indulge in some truly lazy plotting. The story hangs on a twist which ought to be obvious to even the most half-hearted viewer inside that first fifteen minutes, the discovery of which by the rest of the cast drives the second half of the narrative. These subsequent events feel about as credible as the idea the 'twist' would have remained a secret up to this point, or that Li and her incompetent crew would ever have been given their own television show. Worse, the second half tries to make Li out to be a famous personality – through showing us the impact the reveal has on the general populace – yet the first half implies her show has been running on fumes for quite some time. Obviously these things aren't mutually exclusive but the film makes no effort to have either seem particularly credible.

Fan Bingbing and Chapman To try their hardest, Chapman To in particular lending his role way more gravitas than it deserves. The film picks up noticeably in the final act, not least due to his putting a startling amount of emotion into even the most blatant speechifying. On the other hand, Fan Bingbing never entirely recovers from one scene around the halfway mark that strives mightily for pathos but ends up as wildly inappropriate.

Which could describe a great deal of [i]Home Run[/i]; it wants to tug at the viewer's heartstrings but it can't provoke anything beyond a shrug or grudging smirk at best. Too often it just frustrates, squandering a talented cast on toilet humour, threadbare slapstick, lazy stereotypes and barely-disguised moralising. Trite, tedious and not particularly funny, it's an unfortunate blip on two talented stars' resumes and while Zou Yanwen might well have a film career ahead of him, [i]Home Run[/i] isn't the best indication of how that career might develop. It's hardly devoid of merit, but with so many better films available it's impossible to recommend.