Review | Fast & Feel Love movie review: quirky Thai comedy about a would-be cup-stacking champion is much too long
- Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s film follows a speed-stacking hopeful and his partner, a shy, beautiful high-school classmate, who fall in and out of love
- Despite a strong supporting cast and nods to Fast & Furious and Parasite, the lack of chemistry between the leads and its 130-minute runtime work against it
3/5 stars
Shifting gears from nostalgia-fuelled drama to comedy, his latest offering sees a pair of high-school sweethearts struggling to sustain their romance into adulthood, as their wildly differing goals drive them apart.
Nat Kitcharit and Urassaya Sperbund play the ill-fated couple, but it is the hilarious supporting cast that keeps this unnecessarily long film from toppling.
Kao (Nat) dreams of becoming a speed-stacking world champion, so it is little wonder that nobody at his school perceives it as a viable career path.
The “sport” involves stacking towers of plastic cups in a specific order in as fast a time as possible.
It is a discipline open to all ethnicities and genders, who compete online, and Kao is convinced he can make it to the top.
For some reason, his shy, yet beautiful classmate Jay (Urassaya) believes in him, while her own dream is simply to get married, buy a house, and raise a family.
They get together and Jay puts down the deposit for a spacious family home, but her hopes of having children are quickly dashed when Kao claims the nursery as his practice room.
He proceeds to spend every waking hour stacking and re-stacking cups, while Jay dutifully keeps him fed and watered. But as the years pass and world domination continues to elude him, Jay’s patience begins to fray.
She moves out and Kao soon discovers he is incapable of fending for himself.
Despite the script’s penchant for random, chaotic fan service, the supporting cast is excellent, not least Anusara and nine-year-old Keetapat Pongruea, as a cocky scamp who becomes Kao’s reluctant coach.
Nat and Urassaya are amiable enough leads, but their total lack of on-screen chemistry inevitably hurts the film. Stretch this across a runtime in excess of 130 minutes, and Fast & Feel Love soon starts to feel as flimsy as a stack of cups.
