Pen huo nu lang

I had the opportunity to sit down now in 2021 to watch the 1992 Hong Kong comedy "Pen huo nu lang" (aka "She Starts the Fire") for the first time.

Oddly enough, I've never heard about this movie prior to sitting down to watch it. But it being a Hong Kong movie that I hadn't already was sufficient to make me want to watch it. And the fact that the movie had Chingmy Yau on the cast list definitely helped sell the movie as well.

While "She Starts the Fire" was watchable, this was essentially your average run-of-the-mill early 1990s Hong Kong slapstick comedy, for better or worse. I found the movie to be adequately entertaining, but "She Starts the Fire" hardly proved to be a treasure of a movie that I had been missing out on.

The storyline told in "She Starts the Fire" was pretty straight forward, actually with little deviations from what you would expect. So it sort of felt like writers Gordon Chan and Jing Wong were just playing it safe, and letting director Lawrence Cheng essentially run on auto-pilot.

For a comedy then I found "She Starts the Fire" to be rather devoid of funny moments and situations. The movie made me smirk every now and again, but there weren't any laughs throughout the course of the movie.

"She Starts the Fire" is too generic and mundane, failing to stand out among others of similar genre and type back from the early 1990s.

My rating of "She Starts the Fire" lands on a very bland five out of ten stars.