Why so much hype?

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The acting in this movie is really good.

In Hong Kong, Dr. Gao Jing (Lee Sinje) is introduced to the brother of her best girlfriend Chen Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong), the photographer and diver Dave Chen Guo Dong (Guo Xiao Dong). They fall in love for each other and Guo Dong invites Gao Jing to travel to Taiwan to visit an ancient submarine city, where he intends to propose her. During the dive, Guo Dong vanishes and his headless body is found later while Gao Jing cannot recall what happened underwater. She decides to investigate and a bleak mystery is disclosed."Sam Hoi Tsam Yan" is a messy, boring and melodramatic never-ending ghost story. The screenplay is awful, with many ridiculous twists where nothing is what seems to be. This movie is so terrible that gives the sensation that will never end. The only good point is the wonderful cinematography. The absurd plot in IMDb is totally wrong. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "Mergulho Fatal" ("Fatal Dive")

I don't mean to be insulting with my title but to have such a movie from a veteran director of close to 30 years and whose name have been big in HK during the 80's, I guess he must have make this movie for these 2 selected groups of audience.(I will explain later in the SPOILERS part). Yes, we know this director Tsui Hark has been making remakes or following others' box office successes formulas since the 80s and most of his recent movies have been flops. This movie give me the impression that the Tsui Hark & wife team knew the movie will not turn out well but they enjoyed the producer job. In HK cinema, producers control the fund and expenses. So the more complicated the script and more the scenes mean better money-making opportunity for the producers. The reason I guess so is all the unnecessary subplots and "extended endings" actually made the movie worse. The movie has hardly anything original. We get to see too many scenes(see SPOILERS) and ideas copied(lacking the style and class) from HK's recent years' 4 best horror, 3 from the Pang Brothers' "Eye 1 & 2", "Re-Cycle" & Leslie Cheung's last movie, "Inner Senses", and of course, Hollywood's "Ghost". This is the reason why I mentioned it's great for those who are new to movies and the reason why for kids is the logic and concept of the movie is totally out !!(see SPOILERS). Another major flaw if this movie is the dialogue. Just like his previous Chat Gim, TH is not sure of the dialogue. There are too many times dialogue changed and dubbing has been used, making the scenes very unnatural. Most obvious are the opening scenes in this movie. At the end we a get a movie which is a mix of romance, mystery, horror & thriller. As usual in all Tsui Hark's movie, we get some messages that is irrelevant to the story and in this case laughable(see SPOILERS). The only thing worth seeing is the deep ocean idea but matured audience have seen it in "The Deep". The result is like a salad dish with too many types vegetables(mostly stale), served with Japanese sauce, on a Chinese porcelain bowl. Will you like it ?***WARNING:SPOILERS***(Read only if you are sure you will not watch it)1)Nearly all the ghostly scenes are copied from Eye 1 & Eye 2 - 4 scenes in a row of 2 minutes here - Ghost behind Angelica in elevator, hungry ghost eating at a restaurant, lonely ghost in bedroom, ghost coming down from ceiling. 2)This is supposed to be a mystery thriller but Hark throw in a GHOSTLY part which turned out to be totally the character's imagination. For such a concept which is overused in Asian movies, I am sure many better ideas for subplots but don't understand why yet so many mistakes. The first ghostly scene where the funeral caretakers carrying the ghost is out-of -logic. It's a scene not seen by the character and in fact many more.So such scenes should not appear. 3)Angelica Lee's character and idea is directly out of Leslie Cheung in "Inner Senses". 4)Just too many "coincidental" happenings to tie up the loose ends to end the story. Most obvious being the sister "accidently" left the camcorder in someone else' house, placed it on a shelf such that it "accidentally" shakes to drop the recorder when she closed the door. The tape dropped out. Look, it's a high class condo, how could the other wall shakes ? She came back for it but 3rd "accidentally" the person(1 out of 4) who knew where it was placed must be "coincidently" just out for lunch. My maths told me for this whole incident to happen, the chance is 1 out of over a million, in fact, impossible. 5) The love story part is of course, "Ghost" 6) The humanity part is out of "Re-Cycle". 7) The ending message on "environmental safeguarding" which has nothing to do with the story is a big joke !!

ADDITIONAL SPOILER WARNING It's a double irony: it has been suggested in the movie that the protagonist Dr KO Tsing, a psychiatrist, is schizophrenic, something that can be said about the movie itself which cannot quite make up its mind whether to be a love story or a horror thriller. Actually, there shouldn't be a problem for a movie to be both but here the two elements repel each other like oil and water. Another flaw is that there is such a proliferation of borrowed ideas that it compels you to wonder where the originality of director Tsui Hark has gone.The openings scenes are delightfully lucid, an elegant depiction of how a young women CHAN Siu-hoi (Isabella Leung) brings together her photographer brother Kwok-tung and Tsing, both dedicated professionals who have little time for romance but a common interest in diving. As the relationship develops and blossoms, we see the three planning a diving trip to explore a sunken, mysterious ancient kingdom.Abruptly, the next shot brings us to a desolate funeral as we learn that Kwok-tung had died underwater in the adventure while Tsing has had a partial loss of memory of what happened. What ensues, the main body of the movie, is a psychological thriller with an "I see dead people" diversion, and also a distinct "Ghost" (1990) flavour. As the array of mysteries and twists are gradually disentangled, we are finally handed an overriding twist that is not unlike the cop out in movies like "Vanilla sky" (2001). What you've seen in this entire segment is only in Tsing's mind. The accident did happen, but the rest is what she constructs in her mind to try to explain everything.In the third and final segment, we see how Tsing, discharged from the psychiatric hospital and under the care of Siu-hoi, has completely lost her memory. Here, we see a remarkable resemblance to "Floating landscape" (2003) which depicts how a women whose fiancé had died of illness goes to his home town to look for a landscape of white blossoms that he had loved, and in the process discovers more about him. Here, Tsing needs to re-discover Kwok-tung from square one, and the landscape here is "feng loi" ("paradise" in Chinese), in a photograph taken from inside his small hideaway cabin on an idyllic beach, focusing on a small island in the middle of the ocean.The thriller part of the movie is somewhat contrived. The love story should have been better, particularly with the good performance of Angelica Lee, but suffers from lacking a sufficient development before the man dies, as you see in "Ghost". Angelica Lee did as much as anybody could, and the beautiful music (particularly the theme song) helps. In the end, this movie brings flashes of ideas and scenes that remind you of what director Tsui can do, but is on the whole a disappointment.

I hate to make such a statement, but until I see something better from him, I think Tsui Hark has lost his Midas Touch. He had given us wonderful movies, some of which are my personal favourites like the Once Upon A TIme in China series starring Jet Li, and the Blade, but in his attempt to register a more prolific comeback after his less than stellar stab at Hollywood, his recent filmography had blown hot and cold, with more misses save for his collaboration in Triangle. Missing unfortunately falls into the Stinker category.No doubt there's a ton of potential as to how the story could develop, given the teases in the trailer, but what was delivered happened to be a convoluted plot which made very little sense and became extremely indecisive, like an octopus putting its tentacles into every conceivable nook and cranny genre ranging from supernatural romance to psychological thriller, that if it had stuck to one primary idea, it might have been fairly enjoyable. Unfortunately, it seemed like Hark wanted to ape after the contemporary Asian horror masters in the Pang Brothers from technique in storytelling, right down to casting one of their regular lead actress Angelica Lee as the role of Dr Gao Jin, a psychologist who hits it off with underwater photographer Dave Chen (Guo Xiao Dong), the brother of her patient Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong). A whirlwind romance ensues and in Dave's bid to propose to his beau underwater near the ruins off Japan's Yonaguni Island (which you don't get to see at all), tragedy strikes, but we don't get to see what actually happened, providing the avenue for mysterious flashbacks and investigations into what was.But there's when most of the 2 hour runtime seem to find itself stuck in, coming up with so many subplots they get dumped unceremoniously when they no longer fit the whim of the moment. You get some outright statements on ecology and the saving of our oceans, then you get some spooky scenes with mysterious figures and spirits trying to garner some cheap scares. Granted these are the moments which were suspense filled and the audience let on to expect further exploration at a later time, only to be disappointed by its lack of focus no thanks to wanting to experiment with some fiery special effects. Just when you think you got the hang of things, Missing throws you totally off tangent with yet another major revelation almost two-thirds of the way, in what I would deem as a cheap cop-out, where further explanation would spoil it for you.Suffice to say that if you like the Pang Brothers' Diary, then you might buy into Missing. Otherwise, you'll begin to roll your eyes and clock watch, as the story begins to suffer from its now unbelievable and much scattered design, and relied too much on coincidence to move everything forward toward a finale that just seem to not know when to end. And that was its ultimate flaw. It had plenty of moments when to pull the plug to mitigate the suffering of an audience, but no, it dragged on, and on, with each moment building on the ridiculousness of the previous minutes.In all honesty, I understood Tsui Hark's intentions in attempting to bring out a more emotional film about love and lost, especially toward the end when it realized it had burnt the bridges to salvage something horrific. In its lazy presentation in not knowing what to edit and leave out of the story, Missing felt just like one of the props in the movie, a headless body without any clear direction where to go towards. I thought it had hit the nail on the head during one of the many endings, but realized this last ditch attempt was wasted when it still refused to roll the end credits. And no matter how much pedigree Angelica Lee has brought from her reigning Scream- Queen experience, somehow it was just that which turns out to be the albatross around her neck, as she offers nothing new from her range of expressions in movies like The Eye, and Re-cycle, other than look visibly aged. Isabella Leong doesn't fare any better too with her character as she turns vampish in her role when she returns to the incident site to seek out her brother, and Tony Leung Kar Fai and Chang Chen had only supporting roles to bookend the movie. The latter's role was surprisingly the better one as a soft-spoken man with a penchant for predicting the supernatural, but alas is one character that is forgotten soon enough.Final verdict? Watch Missing at your own peril. It does boast some very few moments of genuine horror, and nicely done special effects, before surrendering everything to slip- shoddy storytelling. The more subplots it dwelled upon, the more loopholes managed to creep into it, making the title a premonition of what the movie is actually all about - missing everything needed to make this a decent movie.