Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Michelle Reis, Kenny Bee
Director Gary Tang
Category IIA
It would take more than a trip to the celluloid ER to fix what's wrong with Healing Hearts. Ostensibly inspired by ER- and Chicago Hope-style hospital dramas, this is the first Hong Kong theatrical release shot simultaneously with, and as a pilot to, a soon-to-be-aired television series.
Directed and written by television veteran Gary Tang, no stranger to small-screen hospital series, Healing Hearts is a feature-length TV show and a middling one at that. The medical and personal crises facing Dr Lawrence (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) are predictable, maudlin, and emotionally sham. Leung proves that he is an alchemist, for he delivers a first-rate performance that, although failing to transform the dreck into gelt, provides Healing Hearts with its most watchable moments.
The script gives Lawrence an entire TV season worth of melodrama. He not only must cure his patients, but also come to terms with the senseless hit-and-run death of his beloved wife. A few rays of sunshine are provided by the miraculous awakening of Jackie (Michelle Reis), a comatose beauty who is the girlfriend of Lawrence's colleague Dr Paul (Kenny Bee). Jackie and Paul have an amiable parting, and the unemployed young lady moves in with Lawrence - on a strictly platonic basis that predictably blossoms into 'true love'. She is one of those free spirits whose perkiness makes the world a better place, or so the script would have us believe. Reis, who can be excellent, is decorative and energetic but forced and artificial.