Mystery DVD Club No 9: Shanghai Kiss

Jez Sands

It's a passable film, but one that you can quite easily ignore with absolutely no consequence

Hayden Panettiere pops up in our latest bargain basement DVD - but have we found a gem?

Published on Aug 18, 2009

Mystery DVD Club: we buy lots of cheap DVDs, send them to our writers who don't know what's coming, and then hope we uncover a gem. We've been doing a little bit better of late, too...

Shanghai Kiss is a likable romantic comedy which touches on the themes of identity and race and features Hayden Heroes Panettiere. But its ham-fisted plot devices and unlikely occurrences hamstring what could have been a good movie.

For struggling Asian American actor Liam (Ken Leung), life on the acting circuit has really got him down. He finds himself typecast even before he begins to read for a part - "Do you know martial arts?" "Do you speak Chinese?" - even though the role calls for no martial arts or Chinese and Liam was born in America.

Sulking on the bus home, he bumps into Adelaide (Hayden Panettiere), a sunny, perpetually bubbly school girl who sings at him in order to make him feel better and latches herself onto him like a blonde leach. They become unlikely friends after she strong-arms him into having coffee with her.

Just as he's starting to develop a friendship with her and wincing every time she calls him her boyfriend (just like the audience winces every time she opens her lip-glossed gob), his grandmother dies and he's called away to Shanghai where he finds he's been left her flat. Soon he meets Micki (Kelly Hu), a glamorous Chinese girl, and they start a tentative relationship knowing that he'll have to go back to LA soon.

In a rather hackneyed epiphany, Liam realises ‘here I'm not a Chinese guy, I'm just a guy', and he decides to move to Shanghai only for things with Micki to get more complicated than he first assumed.

Whilst it is heartening to see someone who wants to get in touch with their culture (I'm half-Chinese and I'm still rather sheepish that I know little about my own roots), to make the decision to do so in a split second is corny and damages the revelation.

It's nice to see a comedy which isn't afraid to confront the issue of race head on. For once we're given a believable Asian leading actor who isn't a geek or a martial artist, just a regular frustrated guy. Ken Leung plays his role well, coming off as more than likable and this leads to some amusing, if not hilarious, lines.

But the film trips over itself by throwing implausible situations on the track - women repeatedly fall for him despite his plainness; the film goes out of its way to say, ‘Look an Asian guy who's successful with white women'. So in a bid for him to seem like a normal guy, they've unwittingly lamp-shaded his normal-ness, which makes him seem anything but.

It's also not clear why Adelaide is so obsessed with him or why he puts up with her. In this day and age, a friendship with a 16-year-old is likely to be viewed as suspicious (not that it should be), so it's strange that he should even respond to her initial offer of coffee, let alone put up with her petulant tantrums and childish foot-stomping. Pouting, fluttering your eyelids and saying "pwease" all the time doesn't do much to endear yourself to 28-year-old men, not least the audience, who'll be grinding their molars to powder every time she's on screen.

The theme of identity is an interesting one, but it's raised and then never fully explored. Liam asks questions like ‘who am I?' Where does he fit in? Complicated questions for a light-hearted comedy. He's American-born and raised, so he's clearly an American, but he still feels like he's an outsider because he looks obviously different. He fits in physically in Shanghai, but realises that he knows very little about the culture. But other than flitting between the two locations, Shanghai Kiss doesn't offer any further insight than, ‘maybe you should try other things'.

It's a passable film, but one that you can quite easily ignore with absolutely no consequence and other than to see Hayden Panettiere in a (painfully irritating) role before she shot to fame in Heroes, there's little reason to seek it out.