Just Follow Law (2008)
Just Follow Law (2008) 5/10
Ok, so i was really bored and had nothing better to do. So i watched a Jack Neo Movie. The good news is that it wasn’t as bad as i’d thought i’d be. That doesn’t actually mean that Just Follow Law is a good film, although it passes off as suitably mediocre mindless entertainment. The wafer-thin plot uses the same body switching device seen in films like Freaky Friday and doesn’t bring anything new to the game. The biggest Achilles heel of Singaporean films is terrible acting and equally terrible dialogue. Luckily, Just Follow Law avoids much of these pitfalls. Fann Wong gives a decent, at times even affecting performance while Gurmit Singh is affably likable albeit mediocre. There are some reasonably good supporting roles and surprisingly there is hardly any obviously bad or cringeworthy performance by the cast in general. Dialogue in a mix of english , chinese and singlish is passable and not gratingly fake unlike previous Jack Neo movies. So to conclude, this is actually the best Jack Neo movie i’ve seen. But, that is damning with faint praise because almost all of Neo’s works were either bad or really, really bad. While Just Follow Law is not obviously bad, and possibly even faintly entertaining, it is far from being good. With a cookie cutter plot, over reliance on (bad) CGI and poor resolutions to plot points the film is a generic and forgettable excercise in crass commercialism. The film never aspires to more than middling mediocrity and although, compared to the rest of Jack Neo’s filmography, the film is watchable, it is also painfully unremarkable. So even though Just Follow Law may be the best Jack Neo movie i’ve seen, it is still decidedly rotten and if you really need to watch a film about body switching you are better off picking up Freaky Friday instead.
