King Of Hawkers Review: Local Food Comedy, Starring Dawn Yeoh, Is A Bland, Ordinary Dish

King of Hawkers (PG13)

Starring Dawn Yeoh, Gini Chang, Ryan Lian, Liu Ling Ling, Hugo Ng

Directed by Kelvin Sng

This run-of-the-mill cooking competition flick featuring our hawker food — bak chor mee, chilli crab, bak kut teh, etc — throws in expected ingredients. Including a cockroach-eating scene (hey, it's hawker fare after all). But the whole blend goes bland due to an average, outdated TV-ish script gone askew.

FYI, Stephen Chow's madcap classic, The God Of Cookery, came out in 1996 and still looks fresher.

King Of Hawkers, a mild swallow, stuffs itself with too many unnecessary characters while veering off course from chirpy livestream comedy to clunky sabotage drama.

One villainous character laughs so maniacally in a jarring, bizarre hospital scene, you'd think he's auditioning to be the Joker, making you yearn for Jack Neo's emergency-ward sanities. Neo would likely be more aghast that no realistic Hokkien is spoken in a Singaporean hawker centre in this mostly Mandarin-speaking pic.

Okay, that Joker dude has nutty vengeful family issues. But he may as well be going loco at how, except for the chilli crab, the food preparation close-ups here are so unenticingly shot they make you wanna retract Michelin stars for local dishes.

Director/co-writer Kelvin Sng (The Fortune Handbook) has good intentions. He wants to preserve our hawker food heritage by showing that beloved and humble original tastes should not be replaced by less delish corporate franchise flavours.

The contest chunk of this tale is about a cocky foreign chef from a HK consortium coming to take over by challenging five top stall owners in Sims Vista Food Centre with their businesses at stake. Which is great if only Sng positioned a really saliva-inducing camera to stir up palates.

Or maybe making bak chor mee as the primary good-guy food here is a visually boring thing.

A pity since initially, the mother-daughter pair fronting this stall shows light-hearted appetiser promise. Milling around the cleanest, chattiest hawker folks in Singapore, cooking celeb Nala Zhang (Dawn Yeoh) returns from Hong Kong to revive the once-famous bak chor mee of her dotty mum (Liu Ling Ling), who talks to a potted plant as though it's her dead husband.

Nala dumps her rich philandering HK hubby (Collin Chee) and fearsome mother-in-law (Mimi Chu) to run the stall with her online-savvy daughter, Bei Bei (Gini Chang), and simple-minded helper Ah Dong (Ryan Lian), a comic relief who isn't very comical.

The daughter pumps up netizen-customers with her online vlog which pisses off the hostile chilli crab boss opposite, Ah Lau (Hugo Ng), a bad-tempered man with a himbo-grandson (Kimson Tan) he adores and a detested son (Asher Su) he abuses to closet-psycho level.

Somehow, the arrogant HK chef, Gao Teng (Moses Cheng), Nala's past apprentice who calls her “shifu” like it's a wuxia showdown, pops up to diss our proud Singaporean cuisine and before you know it, we're watching Iron Chef: Hawker Version.

There's something going on here about the hawker centre closing down and the various food masters banding together in defiance which kinda looks interesting as a made-in-Singapore uprising story until, like other good ideas here, it seeps into nothingness.

By then, you'd realise that this film has overcooked itself into a humdrum and passé cooking competition deal which you don't particularly care about.

As King of Hawkers turns into just a bland, ordinary dish. (2/5 stars)

Photo: mm2 Entertainment