The Blind Detective

 Johnnie To is best known to me (and I'd wager, most non-Chinese cinema enthusiasts) for his gangster movies, but the guy has been filming since 1978, and in his ridiculously prolific career he's tried his hand at a ton of genres (including at least a couple of martial arts classics I plan on revisiting soon.)

 This includes comedies, and more specifically, romantic comedies. Now, I didn't know The Blind Detective was a romantic comedy going in, as it's a genre I really dislike, but here we are. I didn't like it, but I didn't turn it off mid-way like I tend to do with a lot of Chinese comedies, never mind romantic comedies. So... success?

 Johnston, the protagonist and titular Blind Detective is an unlikeable, shallow douchebag. Good job he's played by Andy Lau, whose effortless charisma goes a long way in making him sufferable at least some of the time. He used to be a policeman until his blindness got him kicked out of the force, and he's been using his deductive powers to solve cases before the police and get paid some reward money... which is apparently a thing in this movie.

 He's built up as some sort of Sherlock Holmes, but once we see him in action that falls apart quickly; His procedure is to take as much information as possible, try to imagine how things went on, and then... well, he basically pulls a random theory out of his arse based on his magical intuition.

 Seriously, the stuff he comes up with is so full of shit. It's tempting to say the movie is in on how ridiculous everything is, because it does let him get things wrong every now and then, but it's not presented like a flaw in his reasoning, more like a necessary step in working things out. Part of his process. It's a miracle he ever manages to even find a case, let alone solve one.

 His deductive powers so impress Goldie (Sammie Cheng), a rookie police woman who also happens to be  rich and beautiful (now there's an implausible character for you!) that she agrees to pay him one million dollars to track down a girl she slighted ten years ago and subsequently disappeared. Yes, that's the main plot in this movie.

 Or maybe not - as in, this is not the type of movie that is particularly preoccupied with plot. After taking (half) of the money, plus room and board, Johnston starts using her dime to work on other cases, and has the nerve to be offended when she calls him out on it. He automatically assumes she's ugly and constantly patronizes her and treats her like shit, part of it disguised as some sort of training to get her to be as great a detective as him.

 Now, this could be funny, except... it's not a comedy, it's a romantic comedy, and Johnston's actions are all supposed to be at least somewhat charming. We're supposed to root for these two to get together, and find Johnston relatable, even when he's actively torturing his prospective partner because, reasons. Stupid, stupid reasons.

 Goldie, meanwhile, is absolutely smitten with the douchebag, so she basically acts like a doormat for the whole movie - it's her fate to go through the slapstick humiliations that (bad) Chinese cinema seems to find endlessly hilarious.

 There's an uncomfortable edge to their relationship that could have been sharpened into a decent comedy, but the script is so misbegotten that I don't think it even realizes that. It's just going through the formula, you know? The two lovers don't know they're in love until the third act. It's just that in this one, one of them just assumed the other one is fugly and doesn't want his friends to be ashamed of him.

 So we're left with a bloated, unfunny mess of a movie with a beyond fucking terrible script, buoyed by good filmmaking and the ridiculous amounts of charisma of its stars (Guo Tao rounds out the cast as Johnston's frenemy, now a police commissioner). It takes two hours to tell its nothing story.
 There are glimmers of a better movie buried deep in this turgid pile of crap. Andy Lau and Sammie Cheng crack up every now and then during their line deliveries, which hints at the fact that the cast was having way more fun than the viewers; A little annoying, but also endearing. Watching Lau's outsized confidence and silly mannerisms, like the way he plays with his folding cane, is always amusing, even when the script saddles him with unlikeable lines and idiotic attitudes.
 There's also a case-solving scene set in a morgue that is kind of fun, mostly because two assistants stay in the background and add a running commentary. It's also got the lone laugh-out-loud moment in the movie. There's a couple of stunts and a tiny bit of a fight, too, all well made, but they are such a tiny part of the movie as to be negligible.

 These things add up a little, to the point where it makes the film bearable. But I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

The movie's not nationalistic at all, but daaaaamn, check out that production logo...