Dou cha

The legendary "Male Black Gold Tea" and "Female Black Gold Tea" mixed together brings happiness and the concept of tea fights to determine the best tea (making). Promising plot synopsis.

Unfortunately, it just turned out to be another cheesy movie that had too many things that didn't make any sense. They basically went overboard with everything. Exaggerating the tea ceremony, tried to be too artistic, and went too quirky with the comedy.

Although the premise of this movie was very interesting, I thought the story was very poorly written. There were too many ridiculous developments and unnecessary actions/motivations.

Kagawa Teruyuki and Toda Erika delivered decent performances, but not enough to save the film from stupidity. I was surprised by the appearance of Eric Tsang in this movie, but his character was a mystery to the very end.

And this is just my personal preference, but I find it extremely annoying to have actors speak in their non-native languages. I speak both Japanese and Chinese, but I had hard time understanding what they were saying, not to mention it was weird how every main Chinese character somehow knows Japanese and vice versa. Even some of the Chinese actors were Cantonese-speaking HK actors speaking in heavily accented Mandarin. The tea master (I think his name is Chin Shih-jie) did spoke absolutely fluent Chinese and Japanese though, it was a pleasant surprise.

I would think this is a love-or-hate movie, but it definitely didn't live up to its potential.