This film has been amazingly successful in Malaysia, receiving not only overwhelmingly positive word of mouth reviews on social networks but also breaking local box office records. I was inclined to ignore this film since I was unimpressed by such local favourites as Tiger Woohoo and Ice Kacang Puppy Love. But after reading this enthusiastic review on The Star Online which comes close to calling it a better film than even Yasmin Ahmad’s Sepet, I felt that I should at least give it a fair shake.

I’m sad to say however that this is very much the same sort of crowd-pleasing commercial pap as the other entries in the recent spate of Malaysian Chinese movies. The premise seems promising enough: a young Malaysian girl returns home from England to announce her impending marriage to a Caucasian Briton. Her father is a conservative Chinese farmer in Cameron Highlands who disapproves of the pairing and insists on personally travelling across Malaysia to hand deliver wedding invitations. The prospective groom is roped in to help and we have all the right seeds for a road trip movie that involves cross cultural exchanges and pretty Malaysian scenery.

I’d say this for the movie: it features decent cinematography and makes good use of local sights and colours. The scene of celebrations in Penang are both dynamic and visually interesting and good camera work make even dreary old Malaysian highways look charming. And of course there are the pleasant highlands and the picturesque beaches of Sabah. It all looks rather suspiciously like a Visit Malaysia Year advertisement.

Unfortunately it falls flat in almost every other aspect. The acting is mediocre. Australian Ben Pfeifer just doesn’t sell his scenes well enough while Frankie Lee as the father simply looks dour all of the time. As for the female lead, Joanne Yew, while she looks attractive enough when she’s not trying to act, any attempt on her part to convey emotion is so cringe-worthy that she almost single-handedly ruins the movie.

I also find fault with the directing. The comedic timing is way off as jokes drag on uncomfortably long. There is absolutely no reason to feel any sympathy for the girl since she comes across as a whiny bitch. Dialogue is on the nose and so-called heart-warming scenes are recycled from a thousand other films and tv shows. Really? You want to include an archetypal scene of a father waiting late into the night for the daughter to come home? And to do that you need to have the daughter inexplicably go away on holiday in Sabah?

But the film’s worst fault is that it is so fundamentally dishonest. It presents a view of Malaysia that is a complete fantasy so as to be inoffensive. In other to make it qualify as a Malaysian movie, a single Malay character is added as a friend of the father. I guess this is the Malaysian version of the Token Black manoeuvre. The father is somehow able to run a commercially viable farm without any foreign workers. The daughter’s move to England is implausibly ascribed to the father not having the time to bring her up himself, while completely ignoring the financial implications of such a move and how Chinese Malaysians are steadily emigrating out of the country. The father is concerned that the groom doesn’t understand Chinese customs and doesn’t speak the language, but gives no thought to his ability to financially support a family? How very un-Malaysian Chinese of him!

By making the film completely safe, the film-makers have also made it completely bland and out of touch with reality. Films are good only if they have something new to say. You cannot make a good film by doing nothing but reiterate the same, old comfortable truisms that everyone already knows. This is why Sepet actually is a good film and why foreign critics liked it so much.

Finally, I’m annoyed by Malaysians who are giving this film a free pass simply because it is a local film. A good film is one that is a good by any standard, not just one that is discounted because it is Malaysian. I judge this film by the same standards that I judge any other film, whether American, French, Indonesian, Iranian, Korean etc. And by these standards, this is downright bad movie.