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Paul Fonoroff

Starring: Cho Jeong-eun, Daichi Harashima

Director: Cha Chuen-yee

Category: I

Even easy-to-please kids will find little that's super in this inept children's film. Director-writer Cha Chuen-yee displays  an unerring sense for making the wrong choices, taking a potentially interesting  idea about the perils of genetically  modified (GM) food and fashioning it into the celluloid equivalent of a bio-hazard.

Cha and co-scriptwriter Johnny Lee Kwing-kai  have concocted a live-action cartoon, full of exaggerated pranks and  over-the-top high jinks. It's an approach that might have worked if  they hadn't peopled  it with characters too annoying, obnoxious  or ho-hum for viewers to care about them  - let alone be willing to put up with their shenanigans for 90 minutes.

The GM food angle - possibly a first for Hong Kong cinema - is so ludicrous that  it loses any prospect of novelty.

Chloe (Kristal Tin Yui-lei) is a sinister businesswoman who schemes to  dominate the children's food market with her line  of Super Baby products.  She tests her foodstuffs on superkids, including See-chit (Daichi Harashima),  a seven-year-old, emotionally disturbed genius who has  been raised in her lab since birth.  It's all  too preposterous.

Even the supposedly normal characters don't ring true. Sum-tung (Cho Jeong-eun) - See-chit's net friend, to whom he runs after escaping Chloe's clutches - is ridiculously jolly, despite having been abandoned by her mother and raised by her father (Gordon Lam Ka-tung), whose cutesy child-rearing methods would send shivers down the spines of  psychologists.

Then there are Chloe's attempts to destroy the  evidence  by lethally injecting  a dozen sick superkids. This, at least, has a cartoonish quality.  More painful is the facile glossing  of Sum-tung's  pain at having been rejected by her  mother.

The production's chief, albeit weak, selling point is that it marks the Hong Kong debut of nine-year-old Cho, who delighted local audiences as the young Jang Geum  in the Korean television series Jewel in the Palace. In Superkid, by contrast, she's given virtually no opportunity to display   any personality. Harashima, best known for his role in Lost in Time (2003), is  handled in a manner reminiscent of Little Pak Lam, the insufferable child star of the early 1990s.

Among the main cast, only Tin  seems  to  be having a good time. As Hong Kong's answer to Cruella DeVil (even down to slinky outfits decorated with dog motifs), her character offers glimpses of what Superkid might have been, had there been a way to genetically modify the script.

Superkid opens today



Superkid