Producer/writer/director Stephen Chow is a talent who certainly loves his Warner Bros. cartoons. Although his style rarely ever evolves beyond the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shtick, just how he uses those visual tropes never gets tiring. In his latest movie he co-wrote by committee and directed, The Mermaid is a hilarious film partially influenced by Hans Christian Andersen‘s fairy tale The Little Mermaid.
This product is heavy-handed with its set of images in the opening act showing how industry can destroy the environment and during the ala The Cove. When those frames fully explores the plight of the dolphin and other endangered marine life, I wanted to shout, “Yo JOE!” That’s because Ruolan (Zhang Yuqi, 若兰) is as cold and ruthless as The Baroness from G.I. Joe. She’s been manipulating Liu Xuan (Deng Chao, 刘轩). In his back story, he went from rags to riches (another common trait in Chow’s movies) because of her and he did not realize a part of him died along the way.
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