A Review of the Movie 'Crazy Rich Asians'

Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy that revolves between the relationship of an Asian college professor and her rich Asian boyfriend. She has no idea that her boyfriend is rich until they take the trip to Singapore to meet her boyfriend’s friends and family.

There was lots of controversy about this movie as they say it’s the first American movie in 25 years to have an all-Asian cast. It’s nice to see but it’s also a little weird too. I’ve grown up seeing movies with all Asian cast but they usually speak their native language. In this movie, the Asian cast predominantly spoke in English. I know when I went over to Asia not a lot of people speak in English, but that’s beside the point of this movie. It’s nice to see some diversity in film these days. Maybe the next film won’t focus on a predominantly Chinese background but maybe it will since China has a hold on Hollywood lately.

Anyways, the movie was fun but had some boring moments as well. A lot of the film explored the lives of the crazy rich. There was an exorbitant amount of excess displayed. I think I was kind of turned off by that aspect of the movie. I know, what do you expect when you go to a movie called Crazy Rich Asians?

On the plus side, they talk about different themes that do affect Asian cultures and I guess many minority cultures. They talked about the difference between the North American concepts of family versus the Asian mentality of family. There was a little acknowledgement to explain how next-generation immigrants might feel when they go visit their home countries (I wish they dove a little more into that). They explained the different types of wealth they have in Asia (I think they have this all over the world, though). Asian body image perception was touched on subliminally. There is a common perception that Asian males aren’t deemed as attractive and this movie took every opportunity to show off their model looking actors. Lastly, they dove into traditional values and that helped push one of the plot points.

As you can see, that’s a lot of themes they wanted to talk about and they jammed it all into one movie. They did a pretty good job getting all of it in there, but some of the issues could have been fleshed out a little more. It’s supposed to be a light movie so I don’t blame them.

For the most part, it is somewhat a play-by-numbers romantic comedy but with small twists here and there. The acting for the most part was good. However there were certain actors there that were somewhat grating and you could tell they were there simply because they were beautiful people. An example of this is when they were doing this shopping spree scene. I was thinking wow, could the excitement be anymore fake?

The movie audaciously went on to bring up somewhat of a cliff-hanger at the end, already assuming that they’d be green lit for a sequel to the movie. This storyline was somewhat of a mess for me because I was thinking, man, I can definitely not relate to this. It’s 2018, I don’t think guys think like this at all anymore. Whatever, I could be wrong.

Overall there was a lot of cool set pieces that had me wowed. I thought some of it was funny and I thought that it was a passable movie. I just don’t think I would be able to go back to watch this movie over and over again. I give this movie a 6.5 out of 10.