Hello! It's been a while since I wrote about movies and shows! In fact, my last sharing was sometime back in May 2024.
Today, I have an interesting movie to share today! It's a local movie (not a Hollywood film), so most of the readers on Hive might not know or be familiar with these series. It's Money No Enough 3, because there were two previous editions (Money No Enough back in 1998 and Money No Enough 2 back in 2008). While the movies are independent and don't link to each other, they both revolve around the issue of MONEY. If you are observant enough, you would see that the previous years of 1998 and 2008 were quite eventful in the financial system.
Summary
To give a brief summary of movie, without giving out too many spoilers, the story revolved around three friends and their respective families. Two of them were doing pretty okay with life, but one of them was always struggling to earn enough money to get by with life. But one day, he found a breakthrough, and managed to become rich overnight, through unethical means, dabbling in cryptocurrencies, etc and his two friends found it very unbelievable and even wanted to seek his help to invest their savings in cryptocurrencies. As expected, we all knew what happened to cryptocurrencies. Everything came crashing down, and with real money lost, it was the test of their friendship and everyone pointed fingers at one another. As to what happened in the end, you have to watch the movie yourself.
Thoughts
I didn't have much expectations for this movie to be honest because locals like us were very familiar with the typical template storyline, i.e. the storyline builds up, then we get hit by the climax, then the story ends. But this movie actually surprised me by having more depth than I expected. I felt there was a lot of thought that went into developing the flow of the movie, and incorporating many of the latest financial issues which were all too familiar to viewers. Inflation, property prices, cryptocurrencies, just to name a few.
Acting wise, the main characters put up quite top notch acting (in my view of course). Again, I didn't have that much expectations so I was quite impressed, particularly with the emotional scenes. What was interesting was the director brought in a lot of local influencers and content creators to feature in their movie and it was kinda interesting to some of them acting in the movie, even though it was just for a few seconds for some of them.
Takeaways
While I am a fan of comedy movies, I do find that there's something positive about movies which made their audience reflect on life because it means that the drama is actually very relatable.
And it's really the topic of my post: How Far Would One Go To Get Rich?
The movie showed people the extreme side of things, how one who is blinded by greed, and went to the extent of deceiving people close to him. But if we want to be a little sympathetic to the character, if one had been looked down his whole life, it's so easy to be tempted by things which would make one rich overnight, and enjoy all the luxuries which one has never experienced his entire life.
But one big takeaway that I didn't quite like was that the movie seemed to portray cryptocurrencies in a negative light. It gave the impression that it's just a form of gambling. While the price movements are realistic, and you can double your money in a matter of days, I think there's much more to the crypto space. Just like the stock market, there were investors who did their homework and bought the stocks which returned massive gains over the years, and there were also investors who didn't do their homework and lost huge amount of money too. But it doesn't mean the stock market is a bad place. I guess, for the general public as the target audience, it would have made the movie more complex if it went down this route.
Rating
To sum it up, I thought the movie surpassed my relatively low expectations. The storyline was well developed, acting was pretty stellar for some of the main characters, and the issues were very relatable to the local audience, ticking the checkbox as a local movie. That said, it didn't give me a "WOW" and I thought the portrayal of cryptocurrencies could have been more neutral. Who knows, if we get a bull market, we might get a Money No Enough 4 with bitcoin being the highlight of the edition. Lol. So, on balance, this local movie gets 4 out of 5 stars from me, which is pretty decent!
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Past Movie/Show Reviews
| Movie/Show | Post | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| The Hunger Games - The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023): A Lesson About Humanity | Link | 4.5 |
| The Hunger Games (2012): A Lukewarm Appetiser | Link | 3.5 |
| Barbie (2023): What If Barbie Land Was Real? | Link | 3.5 |
| One Piece (2023): A Show About Loyalty, Teamwork and Staying Positive | Link | 5 |
| Warriors Of Future (2022): How Did The Highest Grossing Domestic Film In Hong Kong Fare? | Link | 3 |
| Dumb Money (2023): Is Gamestop Short Squeeze Happening Again? | Link | 4 |