Crazy Rich Asians

If you go to a bachelorette party on an island and the other guests put a huge bloody fish head on your pillow, you are in a horror movie, not a rom-com. Maybe at this point in the history of capitalism there’s not much difference. Crazy Rich Asians looks more like a glossy tourist magazine produced for an international economics summit than a movie.

While Henry Golding just misses the mark at being an actual Anglo-Asian Cary Grant (maybe next time), Constance Wu, playing an Asian American everywoman, comes off generic, a paper doll dressed first as a professor, then as a Disney princess. Among the too numerous cast, Ronny Chieng and Victoria Loke stand out as a sarcastic, mean-spirited young husband and wife who despise each other, unlike the unmemorable Gemma Chan and Pierre Png, who play a more prominent, unfunny version of the same thing. I would gladly watch an entire movie about Chieng and Loke’s shallow, disrespectful, well-dressed irritants wasting their fortune while struggling to maintain their status.