Seeing so many social media celebrities trying to become actors has always been frustrating to me. Real actors spent years, if not decades trying to pursue their career. The fact that Kai Cenat, a mildy entertaining influencer, has the funding and fame to become an actor annoys me. I will be honest that his acting wasn't that bad, then again, he was playing as himself.
The other frustrating thing about this film overall is the very weak sound design being used. I understand the film was shot in 3 days and the feat is not easy, but it was never informed how long post production was. I would assume it would be longer than that, so how come the audio of the characters sound so off balance when one speaks and the other speaks (like they are recorded by two different microphones). That's because they didn't put that much time into the sound design, providing a lackluster balance in the audio.
As stated before, apparently anyone can be an actor nowadays. Kai Cenat was not bad, Ray was terrible, but what irritated more than them both was that Courtney Chen, an actual actress, played her roles badly and her dialogue was awful. I am sure it is not her fault but the pre production team probably just dicked around with the script and made it bad. The dialogue between all characters were not funny but instead really cringe. It tries to stay relevant with Gen Z humor, which is horrible on film and movies. An example would be the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle animation, it was great but sometimes many of the Gen Z humor was very awkward. In this instance, it tries too hard, tries to copy too much of Rush Hour.
Rush Hour is just a masterpiece because of it's originality. I understand that this is heavily inspired by Rush Hour but please choose originality for your next film. Kai Cenat can be entertaining for viewers and everyone also enjoys seeing Ray on the screen, but something original and funny would help everyone appreciate more. There will be many fans that love this short film and consider it the best of all time (probably because it's the only short film they ever seen), but many people in the industry or just movie lovers don't enjoy that. We want to see something original, something special that would shine through. A parody of the original legendary series just because you're famous is not special, it is instead horrible.
This film was only worthy of 3 out of 10 because of the film crew that work on this did a stellar job in filming, especially in 3 days. The only thing I wish they sway away from more is the overusage of anamorphic lens, or just using that in general. Anamorphic lens are better off for artistic films, like Moonlight, but for comedies I believe a regular spherical lens is better.
