Steeped in nostalgia for '70s Chinese cinema, from Bruce Lee kung-fu vehicles to syrupy Taiwanese melodramas, Just One Look integrates full-blown fantasy sequences with action, romance, and physical comedy in a generous grab-bag of popular entertainment. It sounds like a great idea, a broad and unpretentious genre-bender suffused with affection for a bygone era in film history. But the execution is another matter entirely. At every turn, writer-director Riley Ip goes for the most obvious joke, the clumsiest movie reference, or the most haphazard action sequence, leaving a potentially charming piece of escapism that cuts every corner along the way. It doesn't say much for Just One Look that all the clips shown at the town movie house are infinitely more inviting, and that includes raw footage of Nixon watching a ping-pong exhibition during his historic ice-breaking visit to China.
Set in the sleepy island village of Cheung Chau in Hong Kong, the film opens with a policeman and his son watching a gangster thriller in the local movie house. When the father quietly gets up from his seat and commits suicide in the bathroom, the son immediately trains his vengeful eyes on Anthony Wong, a smarmy kingpin who was harassing his father over unpaid debts. Ten years later, the now-grown son (Shawn Yu) makes a living selling sugarcane sticks outside the theater with his goofy friend (Wong You-Nam), but he hasn't dropped his grudge against Wong. While Yu enrolls in a kung-fu class to train for his revenge, he and his friend also get involved with two pretty young women, the master's daughter and a mysterious country girl (played respectively by Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung of the Canto-pop group Twins).
Over the decade leading up to Yu's life-or-death confrontation with Wong, he pegs the gangster with a slingshot at every opportunity, planting welts all over the poor clown's head. This running joke never fails to amuse, but the rest of Just One Look falls conspicuously flat, victimized by bad timing and chronic sloppiness. Fantasy sequences in which Yu and his friends are thrown into the world of a '70s kung-fu film or melodrama seem like a clever way to evoke the period and bring their story to another plane, but they just end up looking cheesy, spoiled by half-executed effects. Goodbye, Dragon Inn this ain't.