ALL OF A SUDDEN (dir. Herman Yau) Although the film delivers a fairly innovative storyline, the production values and stagecraft skills are abysmal. The film opens with a man drunk driving through a metropolitan area looking for women to pickup, and he rear-ends another automobile. Suddenly, and without warning, a naked woman falls from an upper floor of an adjacent apartment building and lands on the roof of his car. All of this occurs within the first five minutes of the movie. No one in this opening scene is important to the story except the naked and very dead woman. The plot becomes inexplicably convoluted and slightly far-fetched, but the film evolves into the story of a man who is seeking retaliation for his wife's infidelity. She (the naked woman) was having an affair with her boss, and her husband is looking for retribution. Unfortunately, the script is nearly unintelligible because the subtitles seem to be interpreted by someone with only a passing knowledge of the English language. These subtitles are ridiculously and absurdly inexact and provide an unintentional comedic subtext to the film. Also, the text is difficult to read, takes up far to much of the screen, and the Mandarin translation is presented first, and then the English . This might have been a passable 'Potboiler Noir', but the overall execution is just too clumsy and unconvincing to take the finished product very seriously.
Review of All of a Sudden
