This is a junk draft of a post idea I’d title “Jack Neo Moral Universe”. It’s an analysis of several of Jack New’s movies, primarily Money No Enough and Ah Boys To Men 1 & 2.
Jack Neo does a pretty good job of depicting the struggles of regular people. But the frustrating thing is that the central conflict of his stories do not address the core issues.
In Money No Enough, the story goes something like this: we live in a materialistic society, money talks, it’s a rich man’s world, etc. Our 3 protagonists are friends with different-ish financial backgrounds and they all end up facing serious financial problems.
I think it’s implied that all of these men are “down on their luck”, or “facing bad times”, “misfortune”, etc. That’s true at some level. But the truth is, they are also astonishingly reckless and irresponsible. Jack’s self-insert character earns $4k/mo while spending $5.5k/mo.
Why do they do this? This is the important question, and it is barely addressed, although it gets revealed in little details if you pay attention. Hui here is showing off a handphone he cannot afford, and is eagerly condescending to his colleague who spends less $. “If you cannot afford it, just say so! She’s still carrying pager, laugh at me!”
Side note: when Ong’s friend gets cheated out of his money, and then can’t pay Ong, he asks Ong to kill him. This is IMO an accurate depiction of the sort of conflict management techniques many of us are raised with. When there is a challenging problem, use emotional outburst as a response. You could see this as an evasion tactic, but I’m not sure if the characters are even well-developed and self-aware enough to realize this.
Ong’s loanshark problem is resolved when the loansharks get arrested. Keong’s problem is resolved when his family wins the prize for a reality tv show.
None of them truly address the core problems of their spending!!!
There’s then this other really lucky thing that happens where the gang starts a car washing business, impresses a wealthy man, and end up getting lots of business and becoming successful. Effectively another lottery win type outcome. And again… doesn’t address the core issue.
What is the core issue? It’s the dark side of materialistic culture. Truly confronting this would require our protagonists to question themselves, their beliefs, their behaviors etc. IMHO, the Jack Neo Moral Universe treats this aspect of culture as immutable, like air or water. And this is the problem I want to talk about.
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In Ah Boys To Men (1+2), similarly, the core events of the plots are the feelings of entitlement that the protagonists have about their girlfriends. They get into a whole bunch of trouble for fighting, going AWOL, etc- one character’s dad almost dies! – downstream of “girl problems”, which are really downstream of simplistic, brash attitudes about masculinity and bravado.
And you see that there is a pattern with Money No Enough. In the Jack Neo Moral Universe, men do not question or examine their feelings. If you feel like overspending to show off, or you feel like beating up the guy who “stole your girl”, you have no choice but to do it. You can be a little conflicted over whether or not you should defend your buddies when they are fighting outsiders over girl problems- then of course you join in, because it is brave and manly to stand up for one’s friends, isn’t that what the army teaches us?
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MNE2: Wow money no enough 2 sucks; extremely unwatchable. basically seems to be a cash grab for Neo to stuff with product placements. no continuity from the first movie, no interesting story, conflict, premise, nothing. 45 mins of ugh so far.
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To be edited / continued. Original Twitter thread here