Hua jia da ren zhuan nan hai [Back to the Good Times] (2018)

(On TV, November 2020) If I understand the film’s lineage correctly, Back to the Good Times is the feature-film follow-up to a seven-episode TV series that first introduced the characters, and that explains a lot about my mixed reaction to the film. In the grand tradition of romantic time-travel comic fantasies, this is a film in which the main character gets a chance to travel fifteen years in the past to correct history by… farting in a dresser. Yeah. We’ve probably reached another level in nonsensical time-travelling mechanisms here, but it’s the thought that counts. Singer-turned-actor Crowd Lu is a likable protagonist as the slightly awkward young man who, finding himself in 2003, sets out to correct his family’s biggest problems. While much of the story is simple enough to follow, there are times in which the film spends so much time on tangents and sub-lot far less interesting than the main plot that it becomes a bit of a chore to sit through those fragments. The multiplicity of characters is bewildering, and I gather that some of their built-in eccentricities were introduced more gradually in the TV show. Still, I enjoyed the trip across time and space into a very different context: it’s messy, but it ends with a big romantic finale, and I really had fun with the cute future fillip at the end. As a standalone film, Back to the Good Times could have benefited from a more even tone (what’s with the one-shot action scene at the beginning?), fewer characters (although Heaven Hai is very cute here) and a more focused narrative… but I’m not looking at this in the same way as most of its target audience did, with the added background of seven episodes to introduce the characters.