Geylang Review: Mark Lee Is Hysterical As Pimp In Red Light District-Set Crime Thriller Produced By Jack Neo - 8days Skip to main content

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Geylang Review: Mark Lee Is Hysterical As Pimp In Red Light District-Set Crime Thriller Produced By Jack Neo

The movie picked up a Golden Horse Award nomination last year for Best Action Choreography. 
Geylang Review: Mark Lee Is Hysterical As Pimp In Red Light District-Set Crime Thriller Produced By Jack Neo

Geylang (M18)

Starring Mark Lee, Sheila Sim, Shane Mardjuki, Gary Lau, Patricia Lin

Directed by Boi Kwong

Good to see a Singaporean movie about the sleazy underside of Geylang that’s shot vividly in actual lorongs.

But as Geylang careens on in neon-noir darkness like a car crash in a washing machine, its characters should be staying instead in Changi.

Changi Prison. Because the body count here can fill an illegal gambling den.

This nocturnal homicidal drama interweaving five individuals takes place in one heady night of high crimes and moral misdemeanours. Inexplicably on the eve of Nomination Day for a looming general election.

Don’t ask me why.

Directed by Boi Kwong and co-produced by Jack Neo, this pic is readily relatable since its title is our principal locale for sin. It’s busy with a lot of scenes. Including right inside a red-light pleasure house. But when these scenes turn messy and plain nuts, well, a familiar name can only go so far.

The body of a prostitute is found by the roadside. Cause and effect are unveiled in a countdown of reverse chronology. From three months, one week, three days ago to the day before the said night, we see flashbacks linking people with things to hide ranging from plausible to preposterous.

Mystery and characters twist, untwine and re-tie themselves into clunky knots. A demented doctor, for instance, harvests an organ from a live victim, but still finds time to make a house call.

Mark Lee is spot-on perfect in this crude environment spouting Hokkien as Fatty, a beleaguered but good-hearted brothel owner who scurries all over the streets. He’s the movie's iffy ethical heart as he grapples with a dementia-stricken father, a missing hooker and a dead Ah Long stuffed into his car boot. Needing to get out of town right away, he’s side-tracked into becoming an accidental fixer by the urgencies of others.

The missing girl, Shangri-la (Taiwanese actress Patricia Lin), is strapped down in the darkened shophouse clinic of the mad doc, Dr Sun (Shane Mardjuki). He’s apologetic about carving out her kidney to save his ailing child but exudes serial-killer vibes like a 10-alarm fire. It stumps me how someone who just had a major organ removed can still flee and converse. “My kidney was taken,” the unwilling donor reveals in a car. Er, okay.

Wrong turn: Sheila Sim picked the wrong night to buy supper in Geylang. 

Meanwhile, Shangri-la's “tattooed cigarette seller” boyfriend, Ah Jie (Gary Lau), searches frantically for her on his neon-lit motorbike — cue night-scene visual effect — by pinging her phone. And a do-gooder lawyer-turned-social worker, Celine Wong (Sheila Sim), kaypohs her way into the picture to the detriment of both life and common sense.

“I'm Celine from Project Angel,” she tells the hookers she's trying to help. You know, without the murderous overkill — no pun intended — this subplot alone would be fascinating enough for a Leaving Las Vegas probe into our very own notorious underworld. In a Leaving Geylang way not seen since Lim Kay Tong went Travis Bickle-loco in 2004’s Perth.

All would be SG-sin fab if only Geylang was more realistic and not over-cooked in high imagination and overwhelmed by way higher improbability.

I’m no expert in crime. But ‘'m pretty sure that mighty rare is any abnormal night in Singapore when a doctor in a signboard-prominent white coat slugs it out with a lawyer in slo-mo on the street. Plus going MMA — Mad Med Aggro — against a pimp and an Ah Beng.

These fights, though, are so well staged, violent and prolonged — especially when supple uncle Lee, scalpels and a killer cupboard are thrown in —  that even a cockroach doesn’t get this much battering.

Director Boi, making a comeback after 2008’s gangster flick, The Days, reportedly said that Geylang is a homage to the likes of Hong Kong shady-underbelly thriller director, Johnnie To. As the sort of tale where a seedy area becomes an ambiguous existential crisis centre for denizens with no easy means of escape.

“Butterflies that can no longer fly, fall to the ground and only death awaits them,” goes the morbid code. Making you wanna slurp the cheng tng there even more gratefully.

But you don’t get a transplanted Johnnie To-ish quality here. Geylang’s characters, connected more by concoction than fate, don’t convey a sure sense of their trapped place of vice. It may be due to the absence of palpable grit since Boi bathes the movie in decoratively lighted colours — red interiors, assorted hues, a tourist-attraction bicycle flitting by —  instead of an overall dusky tint that would’ve instilled a lurking sinister presence.

Check out Zhang Yimou's historical pic, Full River Red, to feel the suspense this undertone brings straightaway.

But even To doesn’t have any character in his films utter this hilarious legislative line, “Only power can protect me. I want to be in parliament.”

Could be that this film, scripted by Link Sng (Long Long Time Ago), wants to claim some official redemption since Geylang, our famous red-light district, is portrayed quite emphatically in an infamous bad light.

I mean, bizarre political folks here actually want to clean up the crime and grime as their big civic ambition as Boi isn’t prepared to go full Saint Jack-cesspool.

The director, to be sure, makes effective use of his location. He keeps his camera low shooting the alleys, lorongs and dark corners while knowing that nothing captures the mood of the hood better than the endemic-terrific face of Mark Lee who’s born to play a procurer afflicted with propriety.

“If you choose to be a pimp, be a righteous one,” his father instructs him as though this is even morally possible.

It’s an incompatibility of sheer opposites —  from authentic to fantastic — which Geylang itself seems to be stricken by too. (3/5 stars)

Photos: mm2 Entertainment

 

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