All’s Well, Ends Well 2012 review

All’s Well, Ends Well 2012 has the dubious honour of being 2012’s first unalloyed cinematic abomination. Having your entire memory archive erased and then replaced with a continuous loop of deleted scenes from New Year’s Eve would be infinitely preferable to just a single minute of this amateur hour hash.

The seventh in a franchise of garish Hong Kong comedies, its wacky sensibility can only be described as the sort of film made in those precious moments when a video camera is about to run out of battery: everything feels rushed, untested, desperate, calamitous, like everyone involved just wants to get this done and get the bar.

Structured as a multi-stranded tale of modern love and romance, Chan Hing-ka and Janet Chun’s film offers a cluster of ever-more abhorrent, self-fixated nincompoops and proceeds to hastily sketch them in to an indiscriminate tumult of purportedly heartwarming vignettes. The single principle which overarches all of this affected mayhem is misogyny. This is a film which stifles you with singing, smiling and pratfalls against a backdrop of neon façades and to an omnipresent soundtrack of toe-curling midi-synth Muzak.

Yet its dark heart pulses to the rank rhythms of quasi-fascistic female suppression, as women dizzily complain how they just wouldn’t be able to get through the day without a strong male presence.

Mining comedy from such dead cert topics as blindness, old age, auto accidents, professional insecurity and homosexuality, it’s a film which lacks even a shred of decency or good taste, not to mention even the most rudimentary of filmmaking/continuity nous. Made purely to tie in with the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, you’d be better advised to sit at home in the dark with a cocktail of expired guava juice and paint thinner before submitting to this film’s noxious idiocy.