Johnny Keep Walking! (PG13)

117 minutes, opens on Jan 25
3 stars

The story: During a round of layoffs, lowly factory technician Hu Jianlin (Da Peng) is mistakenly transferred to the company’s headquarters in the city.

Not only will Hu survive his ill-qualified promotion in the Chinese fish-out-of-water comedy Johnny Keep Walking!, but the middle-aged bumpkin will also blunder his way further up the management hierarchy under the new name John – more befitting of an “international enterprise”.

His farcical misadventures never stray from realism in exposing a workplace culture of Byzantine bureaucracy, “voluntary” overtime, nepotism, scapegoating and corrupt bosses, who are scheming to shutter Hu’s former factory division by means of sabotage – like the organisation has any compunction about cheating his old friends of their livelihood.

The story is backdated to 2019, to the start of the economy’s digital disruption.

This is how Chinese writer-director Dong Runnian (Mr Six, 2015) averts political sensitivities, because his shrewd and briskly entertaining corporate satire is very much a critique of today.

The movie has been a massive box-office hit in China by clearly striking a chord with the country’s current generation of aggrieved white-collar professionals.

The audience see themselves in the human resources manager Ma Jie (Bai Ke), who has had no career advancement despite his grinding hours, and in the young college graduate (Zhuang Dafei) on contract, who has no job security.

Both are emboldened to ally with Hu to stop the conspiracy. The climax is the company gala, where the three colleagues will commandeer the stage for a rap number on working-class solidarity that is as ham-fisted as it is furiously heartfelt.

Hot take: This crowd-pleasing office satire is for every wage slave who has ever been exploited, overlooked or oppressed, and who has not?

If You Are The One 3 (NC16)

119 minutes, opens on Jan 25
2 stars

The story: Chinese actor Ge You and Taiwanese star Shu Qi reunite, sort of, as mismatched couple Qin Fen and Xiaoxiao. The now elderly Qin has retired alone to a mountaintop villa on China’s Hainan island, and he has an artificial intelligence replicant of Xiaoxiao for company.

Feng Xiaogang is China’s most consistent hitmaker, whether directing the disaster epic Aftershock (2010) or the Fan Bingbing caper I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016).

The anti-romance comedy If You Are The One was his hugely profitable two-parter of 2008 and 2010, built around wealthy entrepreneur Qin’s courtship of the unattainable Xiaoxiao, a beauteous flight stewardess half his age.

She agrees to a trial marriage that barely gets under way before she leaves on a whim for charity work.

If You Are The One 3 is set in 2031. With Xiaoxiao gone a decade, he customises an android to ease his loneliness.

The screwball Day-Glo whimsy is more morose than comical and utterly perplexing for its decision to turn a slippery sylph like Xiaoxiao into an automaton and for even existing. It is an unnecessary threequel, where Ge’s voluble delivery of director-cum-co-writer Feng’s clever wordplay is the single pleasure.

Feng takes to literal ends his interrogation of “real” love and all that it implies for commitment and intimacy, as Qin develops feelings for the synthetic Xiaoxiao.

The 2014 British science-fiction film Ex Machina contemplated just such an emotional dilemma. This story, despite its shiny futuristic trappings, is dated by a decade and has nothing else except lazy nostalgia, what with every dear friend (including Fan Wei and Chen Yao) from previous episodes dropping by for sappy reminiscences.

Hot take: Third time is not the charm.