This film is another proof to show there are some Chinese movie producers are trying too hard to make their movies look deep but just turn out to be more pretentious and mindless, there are too many small details failed to match with what they are trying to deliver.
We got a Taiwanese actor to play a Cantonese son, his accent is still more like a Taiwanese talking. He accidentally found out his bio father who deserted his mother and him and moved from a Cantonese city to the neighboring province, working as a garbage collecting employee in a shipping company when he visited there to see if his company could do business with this shipping company. It turned out that his estranged father was a thief, stole the goods and sold to the local market. The father role was played by a Hong Kong actor who naturally spoke Cantonese. There's not any similarity between these two actors who could convince me they are father and son, because their accent were so different.
Then the 2nd part of this film was trying to portray some friendship between two guys who grew up together then grew apart at least 20-25 years, the good one who stayed in Taiwan became a corporate guy while the other became a drug smuggler, a criminal sentenced to death by Singapore's deadly law.
The film spent about 70% trying to show where and how their friendship came from, so they used another two younger players to play when they were teenagers. But the casting people chose a white skin kid to play the guy before he grew up into an almost 35 to 40 years old guy, a guy with dark skin and looked more uglier than the boy who played his younger image with such a natural white skin. Again, other than the skin colors were so different, their ears' shapes were also so different; but we know the fact as no matter how people grow up or grow older, their ears' shapes never change.
I just lost my patience to watch this present-then-flash back-then present-then flash back... merry-go-around crap, it's just so pretentious to convince me to accept these roles transformations.
