Flying with You 一起飛

Story

China, the present day. After living away for a year, He Qianqian (Jang Na-ra), aka "Baby", takes the train home to her father, company chairman He Zhenxiong (Ju Ho-seong), whose ambitious deputy general manager, Xiao Han (Wan Siwei), she had promised to marry if she'd found no one else during the past 12 months. During an attempted robbery at the train station, which Qianqian foils, she gets to know a fellow passenger, Lin Yuxin (Wang Zizi), who's come to meet her boyfriend but can't trace him. Qianqian invites her to stay at her family home. While visiting a beauty spot with Yuxin, Qianqian is "abducted" by former special services soldier Xu Yifan (Jimmy Lin), who's flying by on his paramotor glider. When the glider crashes in the jungle, Yifan's survival skills help them to pass the night unscathed. The incident, however, has been treated as a kidnapping and next day they are found not only by Wang Jiao (Angela Chen), a special forces policewoman privately hired by her friend Xiao Han, but also by a police SWAT squad. The misunderstanding is cleared up, but Xiao Han becomes jealous of Qianqian's friendship with both Yifan and Yuxin. Yuxin suddenly returns home for no reason, though Qianqian tells her she'll continue to look for her missing boyfriend. Meanwhile, Xiao Han asks Wang Jiao to come on to Yifan to divert him away from Qianqian, who is still delaying her marriage to Xiao Han as she discovers he's only interested in money and power, not her.

Review

Primarily targeted at the sizeable fanbase in China for South Korean actress-singer JANG Na-ra 장나라 | 張娜拉, Flying with You 一起飛 is a well-mounted piece of fluff that's diverting on a totally superficial level after a wobbly first half-hour. One of the few South Korean entertainers who can perform reasonably in Mandarin, Jang, who's now 31, is actually more effective when she's not mining her trademark cute/ditzy image (previously on full-bore display in Oh! Happy Day 오！해피데이 (2003)), though she doesn't show any special chemistry here with her co-star, Taiwan actor-singer-racing car enthusiast Jimmy LIN 林志穎 (Speed Angels 極速天使 (2011), If I Were You 變身男女), here playing an ex-special services paragliding nut. Other performances are rom-com routine, with Mainland comedian XIAO Jian 肖劍 (My Own Swordsman 武林外傳 (2011)) overdoing the comic relief in a best-friend role, and Jang's real-life actor father, JU Ho-seong 주호성 | 朱虎聲, looking and behaving unsettlingly like Hong Kong comedian Raymond WONG 黃浩然.

Perpetually flashing back and forth, the script is totally unbelievable even on a rom-com level, though the cast never seems to pretend it's anything else. Director ZHANG Li 張蠡, an August First Film Studio 八一電影制片廠 employee who's worked on many TV dramas, keeps things bubbling along with plenty of good-looking scenery (largely in Shaanxi province, plus some in Yunnan), zippy effects and professional mounting. Even for fans of Jang and Lin, however, this is strictly a blow-and-throw movie. Though Jang hardly looks or acts like a Chinese, her accent is explained away by the line "I grew up in South Korea".