RED NUMBERS (红字) (2013)

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Director: Dominic Ow
Cast: Edmund Chen, Hong Hui Fang, He Jie, Chen Shu Cheng, Henry Thia, Eunice Olsen, Hui Master, Sugie Phua, Wang Meng, Henry Heng, Nick Shen, Lee Chau Min, Raymond Yong, James Wong
RunTime: 1 hr 35 mins
Rating: TBA
Released By: Cathay-Keris Films
Official Website:

Opening Day: 22 February 2013

Synopsis: How lucky are you – or are you not? That's the question Red Numbers asks. The story revolves around a guy who, according to a Fengshui master, only has three lucky minutes in his miserable life. His fortune is wrapped up with a greedy family whose grandfather – dead or alive, nobody knows for sure, holds the key to the winning combination in the 4D lottery. Three minutes, four numbers, a lot of money – or maybe not. .

Movie Review:

Every once in a while comes a Singaporean film about that uniquely Singaporean hobby called 4D (the last we recall was some little-seen movie called ‘Happy Go Lucky’ starring Fann Wong back in 2010), though we cannot quite remember one – besides the proverbial ‘Money No Enough’ – that actually made money at the box office. Unfortunately, ‘Red Numbers’ isn’t going to be quite as lucky as well, and just as most other similar movies that have come before it, the fault is entirely its own.

To be fair, first-time feature filmmaker Dominic Ow does try to approach the subject from a different perspective; instead of the lowbrow humour such movies are typically associated with, Ow tries to inject humour by way of dark comedy. That explains why, for a movie that revolves around luck and superstition, it takes the unintuitive step of opening with a murder. The victim is an elderly man named Lao Gao (Chen Shucheng), who apparently has the uncanny ability of being able to pick ‘red numbers’ (otherwise known as the winning 4D numbers) and whose death sets off the chain of events in the movie.

But what promise such an uncharacteristic opening might hold for the movie is quickly dashed once the rest of the characters are introduced. Rewriting first-time screenwriter Alvin Soe’s (founder and CEO of the movie’s production company Supernova Media) ‘Media Development Authority-funded’ script is veteran MediaCorp story planner Koh Teng Liang, the latter’s background in the television format a tell-tale reason for one of the movie’s key impediments – that is, there are just simply too many characters in the story, most of which are neither interesting nor compelling to begin with.

Indeed, a total of seven different roles are created as Lao Gao’s family members, including Edmund Chen as his nefarious brother Lollipop, Hong Huifang and He Jie as his two daughters, Henry Thia as the former’s husband, Lee Chau Min as the latter’s same-sex lover, Kanny Theng as his granddaughter and Sugie Phua as his granddaughter’s useless boyfriend. Had this been a TV serial, the bevy of colourful characters would have been necessary; but in the context of a movie, the result is an unbridled mess.

The best part about it is that the main character is neither one of them, but rather a Mainland Chinese named Xu Xiao Xu (Rubin), a particularly unlucky person who runs into renowned fengshui expert Master Hui (playing himself) one day and is told that he only has three minutes of good fortune in his entire life. Not sure what to make of it at first, Xiao Xu gets a bit more clarity when Lao Gao appears to him in a series of dreams where each one of Lao Gao’s family members dies in one of four impending tragedies.

While it does seem as if there is some kind of purpose to the story, you probably won’t feel it from the meandering script as well as Ow’s lacklustre direction. Rather than relying on each one of these tragedies to build narrative momentum, Ow simply lets his characters indulge in meaningless banter that adds little to the story. He also has a tendency to let certain scenes drag on for far longer than necessary, especially one in which Xu Xiao is apparently tricked by a vagabond to a cemetery in the middle of the night to find out just what his dreams are all about. By the time each of the disparate story threads are pulled together for the obligatory morality lesson, you’re likely to be too indifferent to care.

Of course, that is also a reflection of the acting on display, which in a nutshell, leaves much to be desired. Teng Liang and co-producer Edmund Chen’s involvement must have convinced MediaCorp veterans Shucheng, Huifang and Henry to participate in the movie, but you can almost see the reluctance on their faces to be part of something this insipid. In particular, Edmund and Henry’s roles are severely underwritten, almost as if added at the last minute to give the film a more dramatic ending. The rest of the supporting actors fare no better, though lead newcomer Rubin does give a decent performance as the hapless chap whose life seems dictated by external circumstances.

Still, a passable lead is hardly enough to overcome the movie’s myriad flaws, especially not with a hodgepodge of half-baked characters, subplots and scenarios neither engaging nor amusing. To Ow’s credit, the attention to detail with regard to the portrayal of fengshui elements in the film is commendable; and there is a nifty but quickly overused device of relating any combination of numbers in the film to a previous winning prize number in the history of 4D. Unless you’re willing to settle for these consolation prizes, there’s little here that promises a winning formula - and its fate amidst other similar movies on the perennial subject of 4D is a certainty you don’t need a fengshui master to see. 

Movie Rating:

(You’re better off saving your money and spending it on a lottery ticket than gambling it on this losing combination of bad scripting, weak direction and middling performances)

Review by Gabriel Chong