Patrick Kong returns with more romantic hijinks as a police officer goes undercover in a model group…
Prolific Hong Kong filmmaker Patrick Kong takes on writing and producing duties on Love Detective from director Wong Pak Kei, who previously helmed Kong’s S for Sex, S for Secrets. The film is a bit of a departure from Kong’s usual cynical romances and very different to Wong’s category III rated serial killer drama Guilty, also released in 2015, being a wacky comedy with a familiar plot following a tough female cop infiltrating a girly model group to solve a series of murders. The film also reteams Wong and Kong with regular collaborators Ivana Wong (Delete My Love) and Pakho Chau (in both S for Sex, S for Secrets and Guilty), along with a host of other recognisable HK entertainment industry faces.
Ivana Wong plays Wong Yuen Bo, a top Hong Kong cop known for her intelligence, toughness and crime-solving abilities, whose world comes crashing down when she gets dumped by her cad of a boyfriend, who leaves her for a young model. After a year of feeling sorry for herself Bo returns to the force to go undercover to track down a killer menacing a new model group called Yoghurt, headed up by manager Jaquelin (Jacqueline Chong, Undercover Duet). While posing as an unlikely idol, she finds herself falling for the possibly-though-probably-not gay trust fund owner of the company, David Cheng (Pakho Chau) and struggles to conceal her real identity as she tries to crack the case.
Love Detective is clearly a film without an original bone in its body, drawing from a long list of undercover female cop comedies, from the 2000 Hollywood Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality through to Wong Jing’s Charlene Choi-starring Beauty on Duty in 2010 – it’s hard not to see a certain amusing irony in the film ripping off the notoriously opportunistic Wong Jing. The film is very much a local production, playing it safe by aiming mostly for a series of easy targets and packing in plenty of Hong Kong pop culture references and gags, poking fun at the idol and entertainment industry without ever really trying anything too sharp or satirical. It’s hard not to see the film as being unambitious as a result, or as a box-ticking piece of fairly basic commercial genre cinema.
To be fair, the film is one designed for a specific audience, and Patrick Kong and Wong Pak Kei are largely just serving up popcorn comedy and romance in a tried and tested fashion that should go down well enough with viewers looking for a harmless piece of daft fun. Though the humour is for the most part lowest-denomination stuff, the film does raise a decent number of laughs, with some effective slapstick along the way – the film is at its funniest when it does venture into more risqué territory, the best jokes coming through the involvement of a trio of creeps who train Bo for her adventures in the leng mo world. A game cast help lift the material, mostly seeming to be having a good time despite the skimpy script, and Ivana Wong is good value in the lead role, bringing a solid amount of charisma and likeable clumsiness to her protagonist, and her performance suggests a future ahead for her in this kind of film.
While there’s nothing here to make Love Detective really stand out from the crowd, it’s a perfectly acceptable piece of undemanding fluff. Patrick Kong and Wong Pak Kei stick to their usual routines and what the film might utterly lack in originality at least tries to make up for in enthusiasm and silliness.