Review | As It Burns movie review: Stephy Tang, Jasper Liu fail to light up horribly unconvincing mystery romance drama
- Dreary, illogical, pointless, arbitrary and ridiculous, Lee Po-cheung’s suspense drama starring Stephy Tang and Jasper Liu wastes its promising set-up
- The main conceit of As It Burns is that Tang plays both the protagonist’s girlfriend and his ex. It’s gutsy of her, but alas, both women are ludicrous creations
1/5 stars
Is a film a murder mystery by default when there are unsolved murders in its story? And does it necessarily qualify as a romance just because its two good-looking leads play lovers who are preoccupied with doing the silliest things for each other?
These are the questions that go through my wandering mind as I sit through As It Burns, a shambles of a suspense drama that decides to flaunt its big reveal not even halfway through its runtime, before wasting the rest of it on one of the least believable love stories in recent memory.
It opens intriguingly enough when service station worker Lo Chi-fung (Jasper Liu Yi-hao) meets his girlfriend, Lam Yam (Stephy Tang Lai-yan), for dinner, only to leave her behind when he receives some cryptic messages from Yin Ching, his high-school lover when the two were still living in their backward hometown.
After tailing Lo to a nightclub and rightly figuring out what’s going on, Lam angrily leaves on her own. A gas explosion occurs in the apartment of Yin later that night, and a charred body believed to be hers is found at the scene.
As the police officer in charge, Ngai (Ray Lui Leung-wai) and his associate Lai (Gladys Li Ching-kwan) quickly put together that Yin has been engaged to a man whose wealthy family despise her.
