3.5/5 stars
As he openly teased in that film’s end-credit scenes, director and co-screenwriter Anselm Chan Mou-yin had always intended to return for an encore. What is less expected is just how pleasant and spontaneously touching Ready or Rot, a direct sequel reuniting all his main actors, turns out to be.
This is not just a vast improvement on the original but is also one of the best-scripted Hong Kong romantic dramas in recent memory, peppered as it is with mature insights into relationships and cheeky words of wisdom about life’s capricious turns – very much the opposite of what Ready or Knot offered.
Photographer Guy (Carlos Chan Ka-lok) and marketing manager Heidi (Michelle Wai Sze-nga) might have disagreed so ferociously on the subject of marriage in the first film that they resorted to underhand tactics to get their own ways, but the long-time couple are finally engaged and mostly happy.
That is, until Guy’s domineering single mother, played by the always enthralling Elaine Jin Yan-ling, parachutes herself in from overseas to dictate every single aspect of the pair’s non-existent wedding plans. Heidi’s irritation only gets worse amid Guy’s silence on the matter.
Meanwhile, things are getting equally tetchy for Guy’s buddies. While reformed womaniser Grey Bear (Chu Pak-hong) suspects that his wife, Jenny (Hedwig Tam Sin-yin), is cheating behind his back, the man-child Kin (Shum Ka-ki) loses his bearings when his girlfriend Jessica (Renci Yeung Sze-wing) becomes pregnant.
These two storylines are primarily played for laughs, and Chan confirms his flair for crowd-pleasing entertainment with the sometimes awkward, often funny scenes of male bonding among the three lead actors.
Elsewhere, but very much in the same spirit, a wordless throwaway scene set in an outdoor car park, where several all-male strangers smoke and drink in solitude before acknowledging each other distantly from their own cars, is also amusingly inspired.
But it is the film’s treatment of Heidi’s difficult relationship with her future mother-in-law that proves its ultimate highlight. It is no small feat to take on one of the most mundane – and common – sources of conflicts in a traditional Chinese family and come out with such a disarmingly heart-warming climax.
While this spirited sequel is again built around an ensemble cast, Wai and Jin easily rise above the rest of their peers with their eye-catching performances. One could make a case that the two actresses have brought Ready or Rot more emotional potency than its screenplay perhaps warrants.