Sweet Alibis

Though Sweet Alibis is garnering praise in the domestic environment as one of the few titles disrupting the uniform production of melodramas, romances and art films, it offers a rather incongruous mishmash for viewers who are not primarily enchanted by domestic (predominantly television) starlets. Humour is supposed to be the main attraction of this genre flick combining elements of buddy movies and romantic comedies on a detective-movie foundation. However, that humour is mostly limited to moronic blather, mugging and the occasional whiff of folksy toilet humour. The attempt to simultaneously have a contrived genre movie, a parade of famous faces and a vulgar folk tale only crushes the potential of each of the contradictory approaches. If we add to this the fact that a significant part of the humour is based on purely local elements such as accents, verbal allusions and absurd names, none of which are translated into English in the official subtitles, the film is a welcome contribution to the diversity of Taiwanese cinema, but like a number of classic Cantonese comedies, it remains an untranslatable experience. (13/09/2014)