Brilliant and touching

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Johnnie To and his frequent collaborator Ka-Fai Wai (Running on Karma, Mad Detective) send up the medical industry and hospitals in particular in a rather nasty black comedy on how its cheaper for a hospital not to help anyone. When an old man is brought into the hospital after being struck by lightning, no one will help him until they find out he's the guy paying the bills. Disgusted the old man decides to let the one person who cared for him to reform the hospital and with the help of two other doctors who care they try to help people. Mean while the highest management tries very hard to thwart their plans because it cuts into their profits.For much of the first half this is a very funny, very biting satire of the battle between greed and caring. It's funny in all the wrong ways as the supposed helpful hospital staff goes out of their way not to help anyone ever. They also go out of their way to thwart the efforts of the three crusading doctors. The mayhem that ensues is the sort of thing that only a truly cynical satirist would come up with. Its wonderful. The problem is that as the film goes on the film kind of develops a heart and finds a direction that doesn't work as well as the earlier part of the film. Certainly the large scale car crash set piece in the second half kind of derails the film. Its well done but doesn't seem to belong in the film. The film remains watchable, and had the opening 40 minutes not been so funny the film would have been good across the board with no sense of let down. Actually the film trails off into oddness after the crash ending with a denouncement that made me go WTF even as it amused me. I have a feeling that the directors had half a movie and some points they wanted to make, but no way of getting off the stage (or filling the second act slot). Still the film is worth seeing, especially for those who have a black sense of humor and a cynical view of the medical profession.

When I first sat down and watched this, I did not know what to expect, I had not read any reviews of the film, and so it had no hype behind it. My first impressions was it was pretty weird, a very black comedy. Note my review contains spoilers about plot details.The story is set in a busy HK Hospital, where all the Doctors, Nurses, Cleaners, etc are slackers, and to make matters worse they are being backed up by the high management, a group of shady looking individuals who you only ever see in the dark, apart from when they look out of there window blinds and you see there bloodshot eyes. Enter Celia Cheung as Yan a headstrong nurse who along with two other doctors, Ekin Cheng as Joe and Jordan Chan as Jim, decide to stop the rot and do everything themselves, from working on trying to save the patients, stocking up the medical supplies, fixing computers, cleaning the toilets, even doing a bit of spot welding on staff cars who need it. To begin with they get abuse from there fellow workers, but this slowly turns to respect and they decide to help out the heroic trio (no pun intended), then just when everything seems to be going well there is a blackout in Hong Kong and a large scale traffic accident which is the films end, sort of.This is basically the films plot, the humour is very dark and it kept me interested because I did not know what was going to happen next, there are loads of surreal touches like talking cars, a dead man who dies and becomes a ghost and chases the two doctors around the ward. There is also a running gag throughout the first part of the film concerning Yan (Celia) who saves a beggars life at the start of the film, he then keeps coming back to Yan saying he loves her, and she keeps rejecting him as he goes through some dramatic changes, until he is literally unrecognizable from what he looked like at first.The big question is will you like this film, I would say yes, because like the trash that Hollywood splurges out, year after year, its unpredictable, enjoyable, and dark, in a way only Asian cinema can do it, but be warned the humour is very Chinese and it may be too different in style to a conventional USA comedy film for example.

This is another quality production from Milkyway Images, directed by Johnny To.Normaly it's difficult to apreciate comedy in Hong Kong movies but this time they managed to pull it of! The story is about three young doctors who try to fight the burocratic system that causes chaos in the hospital.The movie is fast paced with lot's of weird situations that reminded me a lot of Monthy Pyton.So if you're into this kind of weird black humor this one is for you.And watch out for the surprise ending....

It looks like 2000 isn't turning out to be the year for Johnny To and Milky Way. Following the debacle that is "Needing You...," the company brings us the strange hospital farce, "Help!!!" Again, like "Needing..." it is admirable that To & Wai Ka Fai have elected to tackle another genre. This one is slightly more successful, but it's general premise never quite takes shape amidst a lot of chaotic elements. Ekin Cheng, Jordan Chan, and Cecilia Cheung star as a group of determined doctors who work at a hospital where the employees slack off and do nothing to help their patients. This, of course, leads up to some interesting slapstick, incl. a great sequence where a deceased patient's ghost reappears to haunt the physicians. A parody of the opening title sequence of "ER" is also quite successful as well as a 70's disaster movie climax with an overturned bus & a person caught between bamboo sticks (reminiscent of a certain scene in Spielberg's "The Lost World"). Unfortunately, that's about all that really works here and the game cast is left stranded with a couple of disconnected plot threads. Will Johnny To eventually return to the gangster/cop dramas that are his forte? Stay tuned.