UFO - the United Film-makers Organisation - is one of the most successful movie companies in Hong Kong, and regarded by many insiders as the biggest hope for pulling the local industry out of its current doldrums.
Over the past few years, the group of young, largely overseas-educated film-makers has created an array of work endowing Cantonese cinema with a certain yuppie, middlebrow sensibility.
But for all the freshness of their approach, the UFO group is open to charges of superficiality - a preference for 'packaging' over 'content'. Their latest offering, Heaven Can't Wait, is illustrative of the flaws and virtues of the UFO output. It's a satirical look at superstition, the media and the pragmatic nature of relationships in Hong Kong. Li Chi-ngai wears the hat of producer, director and scriptwriter. But the screenplay, co-authored with Yuen Sai-seng and Lam Oi-wah from a story concept by Peter Chan Ho-sun, tends to bite off more than it can chew.
The film gives plum roles to its three leads. Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays a charismatic conman who teams up with a naive young drifter (Chan Siu-chun) and an ambitious television personality (Mok Mun-wai) to fleece the Hong Kong public.
In the process, the trio cover territory previously trod by Network, Forrest Gump and Being There, flitting from theme to theme without adequately exploring any one of them.
The digs at television in Heaven Can't Wait are of the most obvious sort. We get treated to pseudo-behind-the-scenes machinations or juvenile commercial breaks that attempt to induce chuckles at the expense of the film's overall plausibility. Superstitions and cults are also dealt with in a similarly shallow manner.
