Crazy Rich Asians

Based on the first of the popular trilogy of novels, this is an indulgent bit of entertainment as a young game-theory professor travels to Shanghai for the wedding of a friend of her boyfriend, only to discover he’s a lot richer than she thought he was, and his family has very definite ideas about who’s suitable to marry their boy. To a certain extent this is a “celebration of culture” romantic comedy along the lines of, say, “Big Fat Greek Wedding”, and like that film it’s got some very traditional pleasures along with some shamelessly corny comedy. In this case, director John Chu is a very capable visual director – he makes the opulence glisten and the food-porn of a Shanghai market look suitably drool worthy, and there’s some good stuff in the supporting cast (particularly Michelle Yeoh as the boyfriend’s mother – around her, it can be a pretty marginal comedy, with her, scenes elevate to feel like they’re out of a Jane Austen novel, where social codes and working within them are all-important and taken very seriously). The two romantic leads are a little dull (Constance Wu has a bit of pluck to her but doesn’t really get a chance to cut loose very much, Henry Golding is a very pretty lump of wood but his chest is nicely chiselled), there’s a strong supporting cast (Awkwafina from “Ocean’s 8” does the best-friend job with charming goofiness), there’s maybe a few too many subplots (Ronnie Chieng ends up having basically only one joke and no actual plot, and Gemma Chan, so good on TV’s Humans, gets stuck in a sideplot that presumably meant something in the original novel but feels marginal here), and if you examine too closely you might end up thinking maybe a guy who’s prepared to drop his girlfriend in a situation like this without proper preparation isn’t the guy you want to end up with, no matter how loaded he is. But it’s mostly glossy populist fun with a couple of reasonable twists.