It’s one of the biggest domestic releases in China this year. SUCCESSOR, which debuted on July 16, is closing in on US$500 million at the box office and this is even before its roll-out to other markets. The film is opening in Hong Kong this weekend and the big question is whether local audiences here will embrace the film the same way their northern cousins have.

Young Ma Jiye (Xiao Bochen/肖帛辰) is a joyful, hardworking student who lives with his parents, Ma Chenggang (Shen Teng/沈騰, PEGASUS 2) and Chun Lan (Ma Li/馬麗, ARTICLE 20), and Ma’s wheelchair-bound mother (Sa Rina/薩日娜) in a dilapidated compound in the fictional town of Slinky Town. (Did I really need to mention that Slinky Town is fictional?) Every morning before Jiye goes off to school, Chenggang heads off to work on his donkey cart while Chun Lan stays home and begins the housework. When Jiye comes home, he tends to his grandmother in between studying and reading books that she recommends to him. But this whole scenario is a fake. Chenggang is really a multimillionaire and hidden behind false walls and cupboards in their ramshackle home lies a high-tech command centre where a team of minions monitor Jiye’s every move throughout the day, prepare the family’s simple but nutritious meals, clean their home and wash their clothes to perfection. Jiye doesn’t know this though. Chenggang and Chun Lan are hoping to instill a sense of hard work and humility in the boy before they let him in on their master plan to have him to succeed his father in the family business empire, which seems to employ most of Slinky Town. As Jiye reaches high school and prepares to write the entrance exam to get into the prestigious (and fictional) Tsingbei University, cracks start to appear in the ruse leading Jiye (now played by Shi Pengyuan/史彭元 (ARTICLE 20)) to investigate.

My biggest beef, perhaps my only beef, these days with films coming out of China is that they’re all thinly disguised propaganda pieces meant to either extol the hard work of the members of the country’s disciplined services, hype the country’s advances in high tech, or denigrate their regional neighbours by portraying those countries as sh*tholes that are run by criminals. In this respect, SUCCESSOR breaks the mold somewhat by taking a jab at the country’s super-rich but doing so in a “humorous” way. I put “humorous” in air quotes because I barely found SUCCESSOR to be funny and, with the exception of a man sitting behind me in the cinema, neither did anyone else at my screening. That’s not to say that the movie will bomb here or anywhere else in the region when it opens. Heaven knows, the locals in Hong Kong love their absurd comedies. For this gweilo (foreign devil) though, the broad humour wore off very quickly and even became a bit cringeworthy when the audience learns that Ma Chenggang has an older son who was passed over, presumably because of… well, you’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

SUCCESSORS opens in Hong Kong on Thursday (August 22^nd). This movie was definitely not my cup of tea but you may like it.

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