MEETING THE GIANT (再见巨人)

A lot of things could have gone wrong with Meeting The Giant. After all, there’s no guarantee that veteran local actor Jack Choo’s passion project might succeed: not with a first-time director at the helm, and a cast of unknown basketball players making their onscreen debuts. It seems like a recipe for disaster. As it turns out, the resulting film is patchy but not a complete mess. In fact, it can be appealing in a low-key, television-drama kind of way, even though it’s badly hamstrung by an awkward script and uneven pacing.

Gao Ming (played by NG HAN BIN), Wang Shao Hua (played by  MICHAEL LEE), Da Di (played by LIM SHENG YU), team players, Xiao Di (played by IAN FANG) on extreme right
(L-R: Gao Ming (played by NG HAN BIN), Wang Shao Hua (played by MICHAEL LEE), Da Di (played by LIM SHENG YU), team players, Xiao Di (played by IAN FANG) on extreme right)

Junhui (Chua) first meets Chen Hang (Goh), the giant of the title, in secondary school, where the latter’s unmistakable skills with a basketball make him the star of the team – but also a target for his jealous team-mates. When Chen Hang is picked to join an elite team of China-born players being groomed to play for Singapore, Junhui sits in for their training sessions. Soon, Junhui gains a new appreciation for the sport that has plucked these boys out of their homes and brought them together in Singapore.

The biggest problem with Meeting The Giant is, by far, its shambling story, dreamt up by Choo and entrusted to screenwriter Danny Yeo (best known for his work as a radio deejay on 93.3FM). The fundamental premise of the film just doesn’t make much sense: Chinese boys come to Singapore to become better basketball players. It’s not that Singapore hasn’t made use of foreign talent in fleshing out its sports teams; it’s that we usually bring them over after they’ve proven their mettle. No explanation is ever given as to why training in Singapore is an attractive proposition: not for the basketball players themselves, or even their imperious investor, Mr. Long (Choo).

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As it turns out, the narrative decision is financially motivated: Choo and his team want the film to have an appeal beyond our shores, and have brought in a Chinese production company to help defray costs. The China-Singapore angle makes it more marketable, or so the theory goes – and it also results in one of the more disconcerting elements of the film. Because the entire cast of boys is actually Singaporean, practically every character is awkwardly dubbed over in post-production with Chinese accents.

Leaving that aside, Yeo’s script also wanders about as if it’s trying to figure out exactly what it wants to concentrate on. We’re presented with a team of ten boys, half of whom barely register as full-fledged characters with names and personalities of their own. The focus flickers restlessly from fly-on-the-wall Junhui and his budding friendship with Chen Hang, through to team captain Shaohua’s (Michael Lee) relationship with the coach’s daughter, Zhang Fang (Zhuyan), and finally comes to rest on a pair of brothers – Xiaodi (Fang) and Dadi (Lim) – who wind up playing for different teams.

Da Di (played by LIM SHENG YU), Xiao Di (played by Ian Fang), Gao Ming (played by  NG HAN BIN) and coach Zhang Jiang (played by Wang Shuo)

Since there are no actual competitions in which this team of unusual origins can legitimately participate, the film winds up creating dramatic tension through studied artifice. The team goes from playing against second-string players and former national team members to getting stuck in a hopelessly fake and engineered final competition that essentially pits team-mate against team-mate.

To be fair, there are parts of Meeting The Giant that work quite well. The final narrative thread – brother versus brother – proves to be the most affecting of all, and gives Fang, in particular, a chance to really strut his stuff: he goes from sarcastic joker to the kid who’ll break your heart if you let him. The other characters are, for the most part, sympathetically played, although the acting talents of the cast vary quite a bit.

Boys in actionAs a director, Tay makes a decent stab at the material – the pacing of the film occasionally borders on the lethargic, but he has a fairly good handle on emotional scenes (no doubt due to his own background as an actor). The on-court action is very neatly and effectively spliced together. Meeting The Giant is also quite beautifully-shot – it may sometimes have the feel of a mid-afternoon drama serial on TV, but it sure doesn’t look it.

In basketball parlance, an ‘air ball’ is the worst of all shots: one that hits neither the hoop, nor the backboard, nor anything in the vicinity of the basket. Meeting The Giant is, thankfully, not as bad as that. It’s watchable enough, if deeply flawed. But it certainly never reaches the heights you can tell it’s clearly shooting for.

Summary: Misses the shot.

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars

Shawne Wang