Crazy Rich Asians Review

Crazy Rich Asians

Full disclosure, I’m a white dude married to a Chinese immigrant. A lot of things in this movie should have resonated with my wife, but halfway through, she leaned over to me and said, “I’m bored…” There just isn’t a lot going on in this movie, less so than your normal rom-com. The central conflict is that our main character’s boyfriend’s family is super rich while Rachel is only kinda rich. I mean, she’s a professor at NYU, so it’s not like she has it rough or anything. It’s hard to enjoy a movie where everyone’s lives are varying degrees of perfect. Even Rachel’s college roommate, who she later meets up with in Singapore, is really well-off. Just not crazy well-off like her boyfriend’s family.

With the first half of the movie being nothing more than watching rich, super rich, and kinda rich people meet, eat, and party, it’s admittedly not that entertaining unless you like food and designer porn. The class disparity needed to be a bigger issue and needed to be an issue much sooner in the movie. Yes, the mother-in-law eventually says she doesn’t want Rachel to marry her son, but that conflict is too slow to boil and too quickly resolved. If this was supposed to be a Cinderella-like story, we really needed more Cinderella and less Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

So my wife and I left the theater feeling somewhat conflicted. On one hand, we’re happy to support an Asian-centric Hollywood movie, but on the other hand, we don’t want to support the idea that that alone gives it a pass. Yes, the production values were there. Constance Wu was a delight in the lead role. And Awkwafina as the obligatory loud, zany friend was actually pretty funny and arguably the best thing about the movie. Even though Crazy Rich Asians subscribes to a lot of rom-com clichés, it at least does them well. Unfortunately, the story was pretty thin and “boring” overall. But if this marks a new trend in Hollywood diversity, then so be it.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.