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Shing (Nick Cheung Ka Fai) is the doomer, a man affected by
terminal bad luck, & that does not only affect him, but also
everybody he cares for. Not very surprisingly, he wants to end his life
(twice every month), but he is not successful even at that &, when
he jumps off a building, his leap is cushioned off by Stanley Ho - a man
he will soon become friends with -j ust well enough for him to get badly
hurt. In hospital though his luck seems to turn, as he meets beautiful
nurse 'Summer, falls in love with her, & through her gets acquainted
with her brother Spring (Stephen Fung), a notorious gambler &
gangster, who soon sees the potential of the doomer & takes
him gambling to his biggest competition, Brother 9, and, thanks to
Shing's bad luck, wins a fortune off bro 9. Spring proves grateful to
his accomplice though & gives Shing a fair shatre in his winnings so
Shing can soon afford a better lifestyle & even hires some goons of
his own - among them aforementioned Stanley Ho & the weird Feng Shui
master McGull. But Summer does disapprove of the new, gangsterstyle,
Shing & breaks up with him, but not only that, also brother 9 gets
increasingly angry at him & he & his gorgeous female assistant
threaten him quite openly so that he can only be saved by his bumbling
goons. Soon Shing, with the help of Stanley & McGull find out
abotu his bad luck though when they discover a toilet built on his
acestors' graves. They simply remove the bones & bury them at a
proper place & voilà, Shing starts having all the luck he wants. So
lucky he is in fact that he enters a big gambling championship hosted by
brother 9, & Shing proves to be quite a gambler, so good in fact
that 9 tries to pull all the stops, including simple cheating, robbing
Shing's ancestral bones & pissing on them, & he even hires
Master-Super-Übergambler Yamata from Japan, once Spring's gambling
teacher. Still,
Shing manages to win everything - until the culmination of the gambling
tournament, a bet on the soccer worldcup-finals, (Germany vs Brazil)
where Shing suddenly loses everything for having place his bet on
Germany ... but no, the whole thing was an elaborate set-up by Shing,
Spring, & Yamata - in fact in cahoots with our heroes -, who tricked
brother 9 to place all his bets on Germany too & thus losing all his
money to them, who have secretly bet on Brazil of course. & the
ancestral bones the gangsters pissed on ? They were just one more hoax
that Shing & Spring made up to trick their adversary ... & of
course, Shing & Summer make up again. Though
not a direct sequel, this is the 4th instalment in the Conman series,
starring again Nick Cheung Ka Fai (The other 3 parts were Conman
[1998], Conman in Vegas [1999] & Conman in Tokyo
[2000]), a series that itself owes more than a little to another Wong
Jing-series, God of Gamblers, withouth reaching its
quality, though. Conman 2002 however, especially the first half,
also owes a great deal to the 1980 film Hex
vs Witchcraft. Though this movie has an interesting plot, with
surreal comedy & gangster drama blended with each other rather
wildly, the elements don't correspond with each other all that well,
plus at the same time the story is indecisive about which way to go. A rather
bland, uninspired direction does not help one bit either. |
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