Given my love and fascination with the Asian cinema, and the Hong Kong cinema in particular, of course I had to sit down and watch this 2002 romantic comedy titled "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" (aka "Dry Wood Fierce Fire") as I stumbled upon it here in 2023. I had never actually heard about the movie, not that it really mattered.
Writers Chi-Kin Kwok, Gu He, Chi Wai Yeung and Wilson Yip put together an insanely bland and rather disinteresting script and storyline here. The narrative in "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" was sluggish and just generally lacking a proper red thread throughout the course of the movie to guide the audience from A to B. And that made the movie feel erratic and random, and thus draining away any and all enjoyment from it.
I ended up giving up on "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" with only having sat through 40 minutes out of the 97 minutes that the movie ran for. But in those 40 minutes I have to admit that I wasn't the least bit entertained, and director Wilson Yip just failed to capture my interest at all with the bland and pointless script and equally bland and pointless characters.
It was a bit amazing that a romantic comedy with the likes of Louis Koo and Miriam Chin Wah Yeung in the leading roles would strike out that hard. However, they just virtually had nothing to work with here in this 2002 movie. And "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" ended up being a movie that was by no means a memorable movie experience from either of the two.
The movie was lacking totally in both the comedy and romance department, and that made sitting through "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" quite the ordeal.
"Gon Chaai Lit Feng" was a swing and a miss of a movie, one that I will never return to attempt finish watching. Nor is it a movie that I would recommend to fans of Asian romantic comedies.
My rating of "Gon Chaai Lit Feng" lands on a two out of ten stars.