King Jack
One time box office king Jack Ng’s sophomore effort only looks like a standard CNY comedy.
Night King
Director: Jack Ng • Writer: Jack Ng, Ho Miu-kei, Jay Cheung
Starring: Dayo Wong, Sammi Cheng, Louise Wong, Fish Liew, Yeung Wai-lun, Lo Chun-yip, Tse Kwan-ho
Hong Kong • 2hrs 12mins
Opens Hong Kong February 17 • IIB
Grade: B+
Be warned. If you go into Night King | 夜王 expecting end-to-end gut-busting laughter and general giddiness you will be mightily disappointed. Yes, it’s all gold and jaunty jazz and attractive women and Dayo Wong Chi-wah, but you won’t sit there with a silly grin on your face for two solid hours. It has its funny moments, thanks in no small part to Yeung Wai-lun and relative newcomer Kay Choi Wai-kei (and yeah, duh, Dayo Wong) but director Jack Ng Wai-lun has landed firmly in the dramedy genre with his sophomore film. Set in a TST East nightclub during the fading glory years of 2012, Ng’s Hong Kong parable is a icy splash of clear-eyed realism that won’t win a lot of jolly points. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a downer. But it’s certainly not the weightless froth we expect at and for CNY. Kudos to Ng and co-writers Jay Cheung Wan-ching (his collaborator on A Guilty Conscience) and Ho Miu-kei (Love Lies) for baring some teeth and putting a smack-down on the collective drive for material wealth ahead of relationships and fulfilment.
Aside from Cheung, Ng rounded up most of the core cast and crew from his (former) box office champion Conscience for Night King, including sudden box office titan Wong, composers Hanz Au Lok-hang and Iris Liu Wing-sum (partners on Back Home and Time Still Turns the Pages among others), DOP Anthony Pun Yiu-ming (One More Chance), actors Yeung, Louise Wong Dan-ni (Against All Odds), Fish Liew Chi-yu (Someone Like Me), Renci Yeung Si-wing (Behind the Shadows), Ho Kai-wa (Table for Six 2), Tse Kwan-ho (Cesium Fallout), and throws Sammi Cheng Sau-man in for good measure. So no pressure…
Ladies night?
Ng has fused together the bones of several genres – among them the hoary “Save the community centre/church/theatre” movie (Step Up Revolution, Burlesque, The Muppets), a rom-com and a marriage drama – and capped it off with a heist caper. Kind of. As stated, it’s 2012 and TST East is in flux, sort of like how Hong Kong is in 2026. Its glory days are in the rear view and Club EJ and its overlord Foon (Wong) are struggling to make ends meet. When the club’s absentee owner leaves his walking, talking private equity fund of a son Fung (Lo Chun-yip, Montages of a Modern Motherhood) in charge of his financial empire for hot minute Fung sells EJ for (eventually) scraps and puts Foon’s ex-wife and rival club manager Dame V (Cheng, rocking some fabulous Heart hair) in charge of making EJ profitable or closing it. When Fung shows his true colours and puts everyone’s homes and livelihoods at risk, Foon and Dame V call an uneasy truce and gather their found family of club hostesses, Foon’s right hand Turf (Yeung, Papa) and a couple of loyal patrons to hatch a plan to screw the venal Fung over and save EJ.
Ng kicks off Night King with a buoyant, rapid fire opening segment scored to rolling drums and blaring horns, emphasising all that glitters and the gold, Pun’s camera whipping from side to side, table to table and recreating EJ’s peak performance (the club is a set based on the legendary Club BBoss) and the not-quite skeevy work that starts when the sun goes down and ends when the sun comes up. Everything sparkles and shimmers, the booze flows in the smoky rooms and everyone has $500 bills to toss around. Then it all ends and the mood in the club is suddenly as dull and tarnished as its décor and everyone is worried about how to pay the bills. I know, a laff riot. Told ya this was a dramedy.
There’s great fun in watching Foon wheel and deal to keep his customers happy and inspire his entirely uninterested hostesses. To Ng’s credit each member of the sprawling cast gets her moment in the spotlight, and to a woman they rise to the challenge. At the head of the pack are main mama-sans Coco (Wong) and Mimi (Liew), the former of whom is seeing Fung on the side, the latter of whom is Foon’s current squeeze. Mimi’s resemblance to regular guest Mr Yiu’s (Tse) dead wife is crucial to EJ’s grand scheme. Bobo (Yeung) is a favourite of Ace (Ho), another player in the Save EJ plot, and the positively French she’s so over it ChiLing (Mandy Tam Man-huen) and the hilariously unintelligible Kwei-fong (Choi, a discovery) round out the core crew.
It’s not perfect: it’s too long, we don’t need to join the staff karaoke party and we definitely don’t need to see Dame V and Mimi in a bitchy anti-fight over Foon. It’s a tired trope that needs to go away regardless of its place in rom-com DNA. But Ng lets his characters be adults (that’s three now), he lets them be sexual creatures and have normal reactions to money fears. Wong and Cheng have some truly moving moments, when they let their guards down for a second, far from the club and the girls, and are honest with each other in a way only ex-spouses can be and it gives the plot to Save EJ much needed stakes. In between all this are, in fact, jokes, with Yeung the stealth scene-stealer (an improvised scene in the dressing room with Foon is nearly perfect), just a smidge ahead of Choi as the try-hard who’s sure “bad” Cantonese is the key to success. Night King is an ambitious reworking of what a CNY film could be: funny in moments, with a dead serious message about the myth of capitalism, the value of loyalty and the need to live in the world as it is that, like a horse, will kick you right in the ass if you give it a chance.