Although everyone will not know director/actor Stephen Chow, his films Shoalin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle were quite popular a couple of years ago. After these he directed a number of films, with most of them not reaching the same level of popularity. One of them is The Mermaid, in which he presents the viewer with another bizarre story.
Liu Xuan (Chao Deng) is a very successful businessman, who is about to start a new project. However, this project will have a lot of impact on the ecological system, especially on a hidden community of mermaids. One of them, Shan (Yun Lin), has been trained to pretend to be human and to kill Liu. She is notable for her strange behavior, which Liu finds interesting. When the two of them start to get feelings for each other, Shan starts to struggle with executing her mission to protect her community and her feelings. Can this be solved in another way?
The Mermaid contains typical slapstick moments as you’d expect in a Stephen Chow movie. With a message about the environment, this is more than just the jokes (which are sometimes dark). The tone of the film changes from time to time and there will are plenty of jokes a Western audience won’t get, but this is another nice movie by Chow.
