I Want To Be Boss Review: Jack Neo's AI-Themed Comedy Is Silly, Cheap-Looking And Slapdash - 8days Skip to main content

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I Want To Be Boss Review: Jack Neo's AI-Themed Comedy Is Silly, Cheap-Looking And Slapdash

His CNY offering is what happens when you throw a computer into a cai png stall. In other words: it’s a mess!

I Want To Be Boss Review: Jack Neo's  AI-Themed Comedy Is Silly, Cheap-Looking And Slapdash

I Want To Be Boss  (PG13)

Starring Henry Thia, Aileen Tan, Patricia Mok, Dawn Yeoh, Zhang Shuifa, Jack Neo

Directed by Jack Neo

The Jack Neo Chinese New Year comedy goes like this.

No artistry. No underlit tension. Just an over-bright, overlong show that lets his cast yak on and on about the kopitiam topics of the day.

This time in his so-called AI pic fronted by Henry Thia, Neo projects further into the future without seeming like he's even trying. This strangely assembled flick ends up looking daft, cheap and truly slapdash as a bizarre mishmash in a pseudo sci-fi way.

Give points to Neo for breaking out of his Money No Enough and I Not Stupid obsessions.

But the man's idea of AI “artificial intelligence”, not “actually incoherent” is Patricia Mok and Jae Liew extending stiff arms and rotating heads as good and bad robots in tacky body suits borrowed from a 1970s fembot movie.

It's straight out of amateur hour as director/co-writer Neo makes zero attempt to even minor-futurise his trademark HDB-heartlanders setting. As though he suddenly throws a computer into a cai png (mixed vegetables) stall. Yep, he plays a cai png seller here.

For a long while, you forget that there's even some sort of tech input since the first half looks like a Restaurant Wars episode.

Thia plays Ong Dong Nam, a laid-off top chef who opens a hit restaurant with his trendy influencer friend, the Tasty Queen (Dawn Yeoh) of foodie livestreams.

Of course, Thia being Thia, his Nam is a stubborn simpleton who feels looked down upon, demands “face” and wants to become a “big boss COE”. It's an unfunny wrong-spelling running gag about “CEO” which he keeps repeating.

FYI. I might've laughed twice throughout this daffy deal. Once during the singing of a funereal birthday song.

Surrounding Nam are his kids and too-free wife (Aileen Tan), hawker pal Kiong (Neo), and Steven (Zhang Shuifa), an ex-colleague who initially begs to be trained as his apprentice. But he's planning secretly to betray his master by becoming a competitor with a stolen recipe (“Durian Prosperity Rice”, anybody?), deepfake dirty tricks and a bot-vs-bot showdown that's too TV-ish silly to be charging money.

At first, all this is merely a cooked-up cooking drama with Nam getting too big for his head by blithely taking credit for everything. He bickers with his wife and splits with Queen who joins Steven to set up a rival restaurant which thumps Nam's.

Gotta say Thia, centrestage here, is kinda fun to watch as a sourpuss KPKB-er (Hokkien for complainer) who keeps grumbling. Like a whiny little Labubu moppet.

His scenes with Mok, playing Ling Ling the robot, are the movie's best. An oddball hamming it up with an odder gadget as they grapple scandalously in the bedroom when the automaton runs out of charging juice.

Now, the opening scene sees a PM Lawrence Wong-lookalike (Kunhua) making a speech about bringing Singapore into the “new age of AI robots”. But I'm stumped trying to recall exactly when the AI stuff comes into this film like an add-on.

Somehow, long into the tale, Robert the AI-robot salesman (Terence Cao), pops up to unbox Ling Ling in the living room. Besides sticking a vacuum hose into her mouth, she's there to “improve familial and marriage relationships” in Nam's fractious household dispensing domestic advice like an ATM. The wife, whom Nam chides for wasting money and not giving him face, is suspicious of her hubby employing only pretty waitresses.

Huh? Is a story about robotics, circa 2025, after I, Robot; Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence way back in 2001; and countless ingenious bot plots; this simplistically, childishly and lazily easy?

Well, apparently, in the cheesy neo-world of Neo, sans effects, expertise and intelligent rigour, it is.

Okay, about those aforementioned deepfakes. The machine keeps telling the missus, “Be careful of scams”, while she's being duped by a fake online chat run by a “shuai” (handsome) swindler named Ronaldo.

Funny thing is, Neo's product placements whizz by and I actually can't tell whether they're real or not since they look kinda fakey too.

It's what a half-cooked AI thingy does to a viewer.

That, I believe, may have been my second chuckle. (1.5/5 stars)

Photo: mm2 Entertainment

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