It had been 2 Saturdays in a row that I watched a new movie on Celestial Movies cable TV channel. I was intrigued by the movie as it seemed to have a unique plot and it had my most favorite Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan. So what was the movie all about? Let us find out, shall we?
Brief Story Line
On the new year's eve of 2017, three young orphans consisted of Ah Jie (Dong Zijian), Xiaobo (Karry Wang) and Tong Tong (Dilraba Dilmurat - Mr. Pride vs Miss Prejudice, The Flame's Daughter web series etc) were taking shelter in an abandoned general store. Later they found a letter dropped through the door which said to be written from 1993 seeking advice from the store owner. When they wrote a reply to the letter and suddenly received another response, they realized that they have stumbled into something "magical" and decided to proceed with giving responses.
Story would later on focused on some of the people seeking advice from Namiya store back in 1993, such as the struggling musician Qin Lang (Lee hong-chi), a boy who was huge Michael Jackson's fan and a woman working in a night club. The store owner then was Mr. Namiya (Jackie Chan - The Foreigner, Kungfu Yoga etc) who was originally the one replying to the letters dropped at his store.
So how would the story unfold? Why did this happen to the three orphans? Find them all in this unique, intriguing and interesting movie.
End of Brief Story Line
At first when I saw this movie, I had my doubts. The first 10 minutes were unclear of what the movie was going to be, but when the letter started to come, it became quite interesting. And then when the story moved to 1993, it became a lot more intriguing and it was really exciting to see the story unfold. I thought the story telling was quite good and it kept me always wanting to find out more, especially with the surprises we were shown.
Unfortunately though, there were few notable flaws that I think was quite disturbing, such as the bad acting on few of the supporting characters, and also the background setting plus costumes which I thought were not really realistic for the 1990s. I do not know why but personally it felt more like scenes from 1960s rather than the supposed 1990s period. Even the make up for Jackie Chan I thought was not good as he did not look like a natural elderly person. Luckily though, if you look beyond those poor qualities, the wonderful story was able to cover the flaws. My most favorite story was the musician Qin Lang as it had a very nice song titled Reborn sung by Joey Yung. But the other stories were quite touching as well.
Due to the unique story telling where it showed two periods, the movie had quite long duration of almost 2 hours. For me personally, I thought the duration was sufficient to cover all the stories including the quite amazing conclusion. I understand that this movie was an adaptation of Japanese novel titled Miracles of the Namiya General Store (Namiya Zakkaten no Kiseki) written by Keigo Higashino in 2012. However, the main characters were replaced from 3 young boys to 2 boys and 1 girl (at least that's what I thought since Dilraba is a woman. Unless of course if I got it wrongly and Dilraba played a male character which would be very peculiar). There was also a Japanese movie adaptation of this novel which probably would be preferred by fans of the novel. Since I only had the chance to see the Chinese adaptation, I would have to settle for this.
Overall for me, this movie had the potential to be a very wonderful and amazing one as its story was unique and interesting. However, due to some of the flaws that I mentioned earlier, I personally did not feel satisfied. I thought they could do a lot better and make this one a fantastic & touching movie. Too bad though as casual audience like me who liked to see a bit of mystery in a drama, would have better experience had all the supporting cast were able to show good performance in their characters. But then again, if you are really interested in finding out the whole story, then you are welcome to give this a try. It is currently still playing in Celestial Movies channel.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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