CJ7 (2007)

CJ7. Film review. I'm in a opinion that for any movie stars, versatility is a luxury few could afford. Every once in a while (and even probably quite too often), we see an actor/actress that eternally trapped into a certain role that trying to changing lane in a way would sometimes because an almost impossible task. Example, Jennifer Aniston would be forever known as Rachel Green, Matt LeBlanc as Joey, Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully, and so on.

On a certain extent, Stephen Chow suffers from this entrapment as well. Throughout his careers, he was mostly known as an pathetic excellent slapstick, no-brainer comedy film star, up to a point where we would expect something ridiculous and non-sensing comedy style he was famous for, everytime we see his name on screen.

In CJ7, his next combo (starred and directed) film in the wake of Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, he was barely appears on screen and left more portion to his co-stars (notably, in this film, they were mostly children). Thus, those who expected to see a no-brainer Stephen Chow in his usual self, could well be disappointed. In a brief sentence, CJ7 is essentially E.T retold. Not that it was a complete total rip-off or remade or anything, but the key ingredients that prompted us to made a comparison between the two were prominently presents and un-ignorable.

Stephen Chow was a poor father, working hard at a construction site in order to provide his son (Xu Jiao, who was actually a girl, and did a great job shouldering the responsibility of being the real lead of this film) with a lavish education in a private school where everyone of his schoolmates brought a personal notebook computers to school. He was a rag among the rich. I felt sorry for the son right away because he's completely out of place with his surroundings. Had the son has a less strong spirit than what he was shown in the film, it wouldn't be a good education at all for the young mind. Anyway, one day, the child's ego in the son awakens. He wants a robot toy (an Aibo look-a-like), CJ1, that has recently become the standard, must-have toy among his classmates. And for an almost touching moment, the son doesn't care about his father's financial condition. Then, the father picked up an odd green ball from a site-dump instead. But little does he knew that the ball was an Alien egg and shortly after, hatched (or rather, transformed) into a cute Chicken Little sans the glasses thingy that would later the son would named CJ7. From here on, it's easy to see whence the film goes and it's actually nothing spectacular nor even noteworthy. In a nutshell, it was entirely a family film most suitable for children.

Stephen Chow stood in the background in this film. He was rarely seen on screen. And whenever he does, more often than not he would repeat his speech to his son about "Although we being poor, but we don't steal, we don't talk trash, et cetera, et cetera". The real lead in this film was the son. Almost all the noteworthy scenes where the audience's emotions required the most, were his responsibilities. He (or she, as she was actually a girl playing a boy) needs to be convincing in order to made the forementioned scenes worked. And as far as i'm concerned, he (or she) is convincing enough.

Stephen Chow's films were always a guilty pleasure for me. I love to just wasting my time watching his films when i've got absolutely nothing else to do. Especially when he was paired with "Uncle Tat" who is regrettably, had been absent in his last two films (this and Kung Fu Hustle). In CJ7, he tried to depart into something rather more serious than his previous films. I'm not going to say that it's worked, but it was an okay start. It would seems to me that he couldn't really departed from what he was known best. A ridiculous one-liner dialog (evident in the last minutes in this film), a beautiful young female star that appears merely to pleased an eye. Really, Kitty Zhang was hot as hell, but eliminate her scenes from this film, and you won't miss a thing, and of course, an over-the-top martial-art stuffs which given the overall nature of the film, felt a little bit too forced. All in all, i felt that the film had one foot in a boat and another foot in an another boat. These boats were afloat on a water surface, and somebody had thrown a large boulder into the surface and soon or later (entirely depends on your personality as a movie-goers) its generated wave would rock the boats threatening them into an inevitable sinking. In my case, the sinking happens rather early.