It’s My Time Review: Michelle Yeoh Is A Speedcubing Grandma In This Charming Chinese Comedy

It’s My Time (PG13)

Starring Michelle Yeoh, Liu Haoran

Directed by Bai Xue

Michelle Yeoh looks kinda lonely in this good-natured, age-defying, comically competitive family comedy.

Here she is. Bona fide Oscar winner. Basically on her own in China. Without HK or ang moh friends.

Liu Haoran (Detective Chinatown series), playing a coach, is a familiar face. But he doesn’t count as a bestie.

Yeoh spouts a combo of Cantonese and very distinct Michelle-accented Mandarin. No Dear You dialect controversy here. Anything goes.

Worse, she’s plonked into a nursing home as a bad-tempered, outspoken 70-year-old (she’s actually 63) who likes to say “Screw you” to a lot of people and call them cowards.

Okay, It’s My Time – what a lame title – featuring the Rubik’s Cube isn’t as good or as youngish as Fast and Feel Love, the 2022 Thai flick about competitive cup-stacking. Yep, stacking cups. But it’s still fun in a fringe-y, dopey way.

Yeoh plays Grandma Zhao Yanhong, a rebellious, naughty, bordering-on-toxic free spirit surrounded by oldies and prone to breaking rules. She even tries to re-sell stuff from a store to her fellow residents.

It’s actually quite subversively funny to see Yeoh looking clearly a foreigner on the mainland despite the film’s attempt to claim her as a NBC (natural born Chinese). “Elders should stop stirring up trouble,” goes the advice which she doesn’t give a hoot about.

By the way, this pic, helmed and co-written by director Bai Xue (The Crossing), is based on an actual person, Zhao Wenying, a 65-year-old world record holder. In the outtakes, she looks as humbly provincial as Yeoh projects grandstanding international.

Anyway, Grandma Zhao used to be a maths teacher who somehow is very good at twisting a Rubik’s Cube, Magic Cube to hipsters, into completion within seconds. It’s called “speedcubing”. Which makes her a very unlikely senior-thrashing-juniors speedcuber.

There’s a satisfying revenge-of-the-ancients scene here where the old gal mocks a bratty kid in a contest after she humiliates him by winning unexpectedly. “You are so slow,” Zhao teases wickedly, reminding us that she really was a mean queen in Wicked.

Kudos to Yeoh for standing up to ageism like a true sport. Man, she’s flung all kinds of Jurassic Part insults to her face – “With her wrinkled hands, she firmly grabs the cube”. While being dismissed demographically about belonging to the “slowest and most useless group” by an exploitative-bulls**t promo guy, Boss Hu (an amusing Liu Yang). He wants to surge-sell her as a geriatric superstar after she goes viral killing a cube in seconds.

“Show your pain, grow your gain,” Hu exhorts as he makes up multiple return-from-the-dead stories for her to gain sympathy and online likes. SkillsFuture people, please take note of this lucrative skill right now.

Now, normally, when you see an old-and-young teamup in a game-sport competition flick, you’d think it's the old master teaching the young disciple, a la The Karate Kid.

So the twist here in seeing the role reversal of Liu being the exasperated coach, Wu Youwei, a down-and-out ex-world cubing champ, being strung out by Yeoh’s badass granny is quite fun.

Except for one thing. Yeoh is too one-note here and Liu is too underused. In a perfect world, there should be less of her and more of him.

Coach Wu puts in the requisite Rocky-inspired training for Zhao. Or is it Blocky since the cube is actually a block? Whatever.

Thing is, we go through all the standard fare that competition pics do. The most recallable of which is the coach throwing many, many cubes to smithereens for the grandma to re-assemble again and again. Making you wonder whether you should report this show for very cruel elder abuse.

Somewhere chugging along this cube tube, after you lose track of the various ways — algorithms, dominant-hand strategy, etc — of jazzing up what is essentially just fingers turning little squarish things, we’re perked up by its finale in which a blindfolded showdown, yes, unseen Rubik’s Cube, comes into play.

Hey folks, it’s Michelle Yeoh as the PRC contestant at the WCC (World Cubing Championship) in Sydney.

No kidding.

You know, she still looks kinda lonely. (3/5 stars) now in cinemas

Photo: Clover Films