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deandee-48508
Reviews
Bo Gia (2021)
Meaningless and a missed opportunity.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Bo Gia has so much potential to be a culturally impactful movie but just ends up being a missed opportunity. This movie is no where near the caliber of other movies with a US release such as the Debut or Better Luck Tomorrow. It's a movie that loses itself with overpacked plots, too many characters, and crash writing that leaves no real impact for the viewer.
Pros first: the one shot scene. In this movie, there are several one-shot scenes that are just a conversation between the son and the father. What works is that the scenes are shot from the outside of their home, as if we are in the neighborhood eavesdropping on their conversation from the window. It provides an intimate look at the family and supports the the idea that everybody knows your business.
Despite that, this movie has way more problems than it should have.
The most notable problem is that there are way too many plot threads for a 2 hour movie. Try to take everything into account and you will find this movie trying to pack so many different story lines into one movie.
Let's take a look at the subplots
- a deadbeat brother
- Moving from a poorer area to a richer luxury apartment
- a illegitimate child storyline,
- success and scandal from the son
- a random love story reveal
- and the essential family member sick and dying plot.
The problem with having this many plot threads is that the movie doesn't leave any room for the emotion to sit in. It's just scene, reveal, onto the next plot. It doesn't give the audience a chance to care about what just happened. For example, the son discovering he was the father to the little girl his father adopted. That's a huge reveal that was barely touched after.
At the same time, the movie likes its exposition. The movie likes to reveal important character moments by just long winded conversations. For example, it was revealed that the father was once rich but as soon as he lost everything, the family became more and more distant to him. Another example is one of the neighbors confronting her husband about how he made her childless. A really intriguing example is how the son use to cut himself but covered it up with a tattoo. It just felt like the movie needed to find a way to support their subplots so here's some additional dialogue.
Finally, I see a missed opportunity for a lot of the characterization of the movie. Of course we can go round for round talking about different characters but I found it interesting that the neighborhood itself didn't have its own identity. It's such an essential setting for the movie yet it just feels like this random road with no sense of who or what occupies that road.
In the end, the movie just doesn't work as a whole. Maybe an anthology but with so many things thrown in. It just felt very lifeless with no emotion in the end.
(As a sidenote: this movie contains an out of place domestic violence scene where a husband slaps his wife. They were trying to portray the husband as this timid guy who was finally standing up to his wife but there wasn't a real subplot in regards to the wife berating her husband. It felt out of place, made the husband look less sympathetic, and didn't serve any purpose)