Simply Actors (2007)

"Crap Acting!" This note is found on a killed undercover cop, and the police chiefs of Hong Kong decide that it would be good to brush up the acting skills of the troop. As a first try out, they send PC Man Long (Jim Chim) to a drama school. Man Long is thrilled, as he always dreamt of being an actor, but his new co-eds and the teachers are underwhelmed by his constant enthusiastic overacting.

There is another new pupil in class, the soft-core porn actress Dani Dan (Charlene Choi), who has two prominent talents and a very friendly personality. She and Man Long bond immediately and becomne partners for the coveted roles of Romeo and Juliet in the play, the class will stage at the end of the term.

SIMPLY ACTORS s mainly a show-case for comedian Jim Chi, who goes over the top as far as possible as the over enthusiastic wannabe actor. Ironically - or appropriately - Chim is a respected acting-coach, and one of his protegés is Charlene Choi. Choi is the main female lead but plays second fiddle to the Jim-Chim-Show. And she is really fine. I have seen nearly all of her pictures, starting with FUNERAL MARCH, and while at first the enjoyment was more of a "guilty pleasure", in the last couple of movies she really begins to shine as an actress: ALL ABOUT LOVE, DIARY, the not quite satisfactory SUPER FANS - Charlene really starts to widen her range. And playing a porn actress (with obviously fake breasts) is indeed far away from her usual clean cut, innocent girls, even though her "Dani Dan" has a certain lovable spontaneity and naivety that is not incongruous with her earlier screen persona.

But this film is not about Charlene Choi, it is about Jim Chim and - even more - about the art of acting and the love of an actor for his craft. The plot of the movie takes a back seat to (very funny) acting lessons for Man Long and the audience.
and these lessons are delivered by some of the biggest and beloved people in HK movie business: Eric Tsang and Anthony Wong have cameos as teachers (okay Wong plays a janitor, but he is a much better mentor than all the "real" teachers) and even Chapman To, who plays a gangster, gives Man Long very good advise.
But these are not the only cameos. Indeed the movie sometimes seems to consist of nothing but cameos. It starts right at the beginning with the police chiefs, discussing the acting abilities of their subordinates: all of them are played by movie directors. Off hand I recall Ann Hui and Vincent Kok. Later on, Alan Mak plays himself in a funny scene. but this are only the directors. In a street scene we see Sandra Ng, Isablla Leong, Josie Ho and numerous others in very small but funny parts.

The funny cameos and the string of Jim-Chim-mugs-it-up routines are the attraction and the weakness of the movie. One and a half hours of funny acting lessons and wacky over-acting tire you out and you begin to wonder how to wind up the movie in a satisfactory way. Well, the filmmakers came to a quite unfortunate solution: forget all the plot about undercover cops and start a NEW storyline about a gangster (Lam Suet)threatening the father of one of Man Long's co-eds. And that takes another half an hour to conclude.

Directors Chan Hing-Kai and Patrick Leung are too much in love with all the little details, performances and cameos and forget the movie as a whole. A much tighter script, more substantial roles and less cameos and primarily a better constructed story would have benefited the movie and we would have a really good film and not only SIMPLY ACTORS.