Narcotics Heroes (2023)

Disappointing

As this was a Youku joint production with TVB, I knew to expect the typical Youku grim-dark grey sombre tone they love to slather all over their dramas, and yes, it's here. As soon as episode 1 started, it was just full of pure grim-dark seedy Hong Kong undertones.

I don't hate this drama at all, don't get me wrong. It has Moses Chan as a terminal cancer sufferer who was locked up for drug dealing, and after over a decade in prison,wants to spend his last remaining time alive dealing even more drugs. Then we have Nancy Wu being this strange shades-of-grey character that has us guessing if she is helping Moses or not. Then we have the police officer played by Edwin Siu, who has mild brain damage so is unable to feel emotions properly, which really frustrates his ex-girlfriend played by Kelly Cheung, who still has feelings for him. It is all great acting and I enjoyed it a lot. What ruins the entire drama is Matthew Ho's character and how some of the writing just makes no darn sense.

Oh yeah, there will be spoilers, so just warning you.

Matthew Ho plays this mute food delivery guy that communicates using Hong Kong sign language. This was great, I thought, because we wouldn't have to hear Matthew speaking, because I do find his acting rather terrible. He always plays the same role of "oblivious idiot is oblivious", but they added voiceovers spoken by him to let us know what he is saying anyway. That's pretty normal for mute characters on TVB though, so that is not my complaint. My complaint is that it seems every single person, for reasons unknown, cares a lot about him a lot for NO REASON. It makes no sense why they all care about him so much as there were no events that had Matthew do stuff to make them indebted to him. Instead, they just somehow slowly grew protective of him over the course of the drama, and I kept wondering if I had missed any episodes where these people owed him... but no!

For example, Rosita Kwok's character grew up with him so her caring about him I understand, but later we see the reporter Bowie Cheung suddenly caring a lot about him. Why? And then we had Moses Chan's Man Wah who meets him once after Nancy Wu introduced them, and then suddenly - out of the blue - Moses claims he treats Matthew like family and wants to give him all this stuff to help him. Why did that happen and when? And everybody learns sign language in record time to be able to read his hand signs.

And the thing that broke the character for me was when his kid sister was kidnapped and is later accidentally killed due to a plan gone wrong. The cause is related to Moses and yet somehow Matthew - who knew Moses was involved - is completely okay with the guy and even speaks to him soon after while calling him a friend. Dude... your sister died because of that man, what is wrong with you?

One great thing about the drama though is the great main theme song. Dang, that is one cool canto metal track, but it can't make me put the score higher than a 6 out of 10 overall. Matthew Ho ruins it.

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