Money No Enough 3 (PG13)
137 minutes, opens on Feb 1
1 star
The story: Director-cum-co-writer Jack Neo reunites with Mark Lee and Henry Thia to play three lifelong friends muddling through the perennial problem of their blockbuster franchise title.
The 1998 smash Money No Enough grossed a record $5.8 million in a milestone for Singapore cinema. The local satire on greed and materialism hit especially close to home in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.
Twenty-six years later, the new gig economy in Money No Enough 3 is no kinder to Lee’s deliveryman character Ah Huang.
Desperate debts again push him into ruinous get-rich-quick schemes with money borrowed from his now middle-aged kampung “brudders”, Neo’s Grab driver Ah Qiang and Thia’s Teochew porridge stall owner Ah Hui.
Will he never learn? Sadder still, can the comedy series ever progress past mawkish moralising, toilet humour, sitcom skits and coffee-shop talk?
From foreign worker levy to ageing hawker trade to unmotivated Gen Z, every popular social woe is checked off and then trivialised for callous laughs. Charity scams are a hoot. Crypto bankruptcy is a gag.
Workplace sexual harassment cues the atrocious punning of “prostitute” and “positude” – as in “positive attitude”.
And, how hilarious, organ failure from dodgy health supplements – which was already a plot device in the previous film Money No Enough 2 (2008).
This third instalment is a lazy remix of the earlier two, right down to the bathetic climax involving not one, but two, dying kin.
In an ensemble of Mediacorp veterans where even Xiang Yun and Patricia Mok think the shoutier the acting, the more convincing, Regina Lim in the role of Ah Huang’s adult daughter and Braven Yeo in his movie debut as Ah Hui’s son impress with their grounded performances.
Hot take: Words are no enough to describe this grating watch.
Badland Hunters (M18)
107 minutes, available on Netflix
3 stars
The story: K-cinema action hero Don Lee headlines as a fearless huntsman, scouring a lawless post-apocalyptic wasteland for a teen girl abducted by a mad doctor.
Lee has captured a monster crocodile by the tail, decapitated it, and seen off a band of marauders before his character is even formally introduced in Badland Hunters. It may be end times in what was once the South Korean capital of Seoul, three years after a cataclysmic earthquake, but all will be well with Lee around.
This dystopian drama directed by Heo Myeong-haeng, the stunt coordinator on Lee’s The Roundup hit crime series (2017 to 2023), continues the mythologisation of the hugely popular bruiser.
The 90kg actor is also plain huge.
His gruff but soft-hearted Nam San is a survivor in a dusty outpost, the only person – along with his archer protege (Lee Jun-young), plus a special forces sergeant (Ahn Ji-hye) – who can rescue young neighbour Su-na (Roh Jeong-eui) when she is lured away by a cult promising food and water.
Su-na finds herself in an apartment complex, although this Netflix production is not a spin-off of Concrete Utopia (2023) as widely speculated: A scientist (Lee Hee-jun) is experimenting on brainwashed juveniles to bioengineer a new human race for the devastated world.
This landscape is the usual computer-generated expanse of dirt and crumbling concrete, and Nam will flatten the mutant guards with punishing blows, shotgun and machete.
But for a good 30 minutes mid-movie, as Su-na comes to realise the heinous fate awaiting her, the serviceable action-adventure is a suspenseful and sinister sci-fi horror.
Hot take: Don Lee is true to form, pummelling bad guys in an adequate if unsurprising star vehicle.
