ReviewOne Night at School movie review: Cantopop star Michael Cheung makes feature-film acting debut in madcap comedy that is more juvenile than funny
2/5 stars
There are plenty of outrageous moments and not enough funny ones in One Night at School. The second film directed by photographer and radio/TV host Sunny Lau Yung is a madcap comedy in which three unrelated groups of characters converge in an abandoned school for a surprisingly unexciting night of misadventures.
In a set-up reminiscent of Lau’s directorial debut, Sugar Street Studio (a horror comedy that premiered at overseas festivals in 2021 but has yet to open in Hong Kong cinemas), One Night at School takes a deserted and supposedly haunted location as its main attraction and builds its eclectic ensemble of characters around it.
The first, and most watchable, storyline centres around Kan (Ling Man-lung), an inventor of comically useless gadgets who has just been dumped by his girlfriend – thanks in no small part to Szeto (rising Cantopop star Michael Cheung Tin-fu in a memorable debut), his freeloading and endlessly obnoxious buddy.
When Szeto learns from the news that a deceased tycoon is set for a delayed burial because of feng shui, he forces Kan to join him in a kidnapping plot that involves stealing the corpse from a mortuary – only for the pair to erroneously take the body of Yat (Eric Kot Man-fai), a recently retired gangster boss.
Meanwhile, a quartet of female performers – including Heidi Lee Ching-yee’s schemer and Ashina Kwok Yik-sam’s science geek – are coerced by the advertising company they’re contracted to into hosting a supernatural-themed live stream in the schoolyard where Yat’s body is now hidden.
In the third narrative strand, Yat’s grieving son, Yin (Ng Siu-hin), sends his gang out to abduct his father’s former colleague Lung (Jim Chim Sui-man) in the belief that the latter was responsible for the death. And they just so happen to end up in the same campus where everyone else is.
Frequently mistaking vulgarity and immaturity for humour, the ludicrous story – credited to Lau, Kan Pok-chuen and Elf Chan Chi-sing – is most haphazardly put together. It begins promisingly but seemingly runs out of ideas once the characters are locked inside the school premises midway through the story.
The hip young cast is a welcome distraction and a couple of the infantile gags do inspire a giggle, but One Night at School never quite figures out what it wants to achieve: it is neither transgressive enough to attract a late-night cult following nor family-friendly enough to pull in Michael Cheung’s legion of younger fans.
