QUEEN OF MAHJONG (麻雀女王追男仔) (2025)

Genre: Comedy
Director: Wong Jing, Patrick Kong
Cast: Kenneth Ma, Samantha Ko, Dada Chan, Carlos Chan, Bob Lam, Hui Shiu Hung 
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Coarse Language And Sexual References)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 28 January 2025

Synopsis: Queen of Mahjong, a Chinese New Year Hong Kong movie set for release in 2025's Year of the Snake, follows the hilarious and heartwarming stories of love, family, and hidden secrets in the Long family – Village Chief Long with his 3 daughters and 1 son. With three couples navigating love and laughter in their own unique ways, how will it all end? Find out in The Queen of Mahjong—a festive comedy that promises to light up with waves of laughter in cinemas this 2025!

Movie Review:

We’ve lost count on the number of mahjong-themed movies that Wong Jing has written, produced or directed, but it is pretty obvious from the title that ‘Queen of Mahjong’ harks back to the sort of over-the-top mahjong comedies that Wong Jing is synonymous with.

The titular character is Elsa (Samantha Ko), a top insurance agent whose love for mahjong began when her mother went into labour while playing the game; and although her mother had passed away when she was seven, Elsa subsequently became a pro. Unfortunately, as fate (or scriptwriting convention) would have it, Elsa’s high school crush Martin (Kenneth Ma), whom she has a chance reunion one day and immediately falls back in love with, detests mahjong because of his mother’s gambling addiction and consequent neglect.

While trying to conceal her skills from Martin, Elsa finds her mahjong competencies uncannily useful in winning back an important client named Mama Mia (Rainbow Ching) that her team member has inadvertently offended, after mistaking the latter for asking for Maria Condero instead of Mariah Carey concert tickets (no spoilers; this is in the trailer). It isn’t hard to guess that Martin will eventually find out that Elsa is great at the game, nor that the movie will end with an ultimate showdown at a mahjong tournament, where Elsa will prove indeed to be the queen of mahjong.

On his part, Martin is an inventor, whose latest creation is an AI-enabled helmet called Regret Vision Pro that can help its user visualise things from his or her past or simply his or her own fantasies. Let’s just say there isn’t much coherence to it, not when the helmet can help Elsa recall her meet-cute with Martin during their high school days, as well as help Martin’s assistant watch 3D porn (lest we forget, this is still a Wong Jing movie).

Besides Elsa and Martin, the movie also splits its time with Sammy (Dada Chan) and Winnie (Kris Cheung). A former primary school drama teacher who gets fired after getting a kid to admit that he would weep if he had lost his helper than his mother, Sammy signs up to be an intimacy instructor for movie star Tony’s (Carlos Chan) latest endeavour, an arthouse movie meant to restore his goodwill with audiences after his latest abusive on-set behaviour goes viral.

Truth be told, Sammy largely ends up playing second fiddle to Tony, whose exaggerated over-acting is one of the running jokes of this subplot. It also gives fans of Carlos the chance to see him in a comedic role, which the actor pulls off relatively well. Before we forget, there is also within this story a young, up-and-coming starlet called Coco (Mizuki Lin), who is Tony’s co-star but whose significance onscreen goes no further than as eye candy.

Last but not least, there is Winnie, who gets her shot at love with a hustler named George (Jiro Lee), whose sexist nature is taught a lesson after being put under a spell by Master Hypnotist Ng. For those who have seen the trailer, this is the subplot that has George seeing the opposite in women because of the spell, thinking that the overweight Winnie is in fact a voluptuous beauty, and the same subplot which sees George’s uncle call Winnie an ‘ape’ that eats dim sum (again, this is a Wong Jing movie).

If it seems all over the place, then you should know too that Wong Jing and his co-director Patrick Kong try to tie these disparate stories together with a loose parody of ‘Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In’, what with Elsa, Sammy and Winnie being summoned by their father Twister (Benz Hui) after the latter finds out that each of them has found a new partner. It is no secret that Twister is modelled after Louis Koo’s character Cyclone, and even Hui makes no apologies for saying that everyone in his village knows him as ‘Louis Koo’.

Frankly, regardless of how they try (and perhaps at least they do), this is really a scattershot bag of half-baked jokes that only occasionally raise a chuckle. Despite an entire roster of TVB stars, none of them gets to do anything more than they probably would in a 45-minute TVB episode, and for some like Ma, fans may even say that their time here is utterly wasted. We shan’t even start about the political correctness of the sexism on display here, in part because it is a sign of the times that what used to be a staple formula for Wong Jing’s comedies now seem antiquated.

We’d say though that there is hardly any reason to spend your time with the ‘Queen of Mahjong’, except if you’re looking to kill some in between visiting during this Lunar New Year. Wong Jing talks about how there has been a dearth of comedies in Hong Kong cinema these few years, and how he hopes to revive that with his latest; unfortunately, like he has also acknowledged, even successful formulas last but 5 – 6 years, and while ‘Queen of Mahjong’ could have been a modest success in the 1990s, it is simply way past its sell by date in this day and age.

Movie Rating:

(Scattershot, largely infantile, and never quite amusing, this mahjong-themed slapstick comedy hardly has a winning hand)

Review by Gabriel Chong


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