Dead Ringer (2023)

Just what the f were the writers smoking?

Like what on earth were the writers on? I ask this because this drama just had me going “wtf?” almost constantly. Most of Bosco Wong’s stuff is not bad, even at it’s worse it’s at least a 5-6 score and average. This somehow managed to be less than average, and as I am currently 14 episodes in I am not holding out any hope of this getting better.

The drama is about Chrissie Chau playing two roles as twin sisters. The younger sister is an insurance broker whereas the elder sister is a Singaporean elite cop. These twins were separated since they were kids and have not seen each other in 20 years. The younger sister was mixed up in some shady stuff and while in Singapore she gets murdered and has her heart removed by organ traffickers. Cop sister discovers this and decides to travel to Hong Kong undercover to find who killed her sister.

Now, this is not a bad premise, except that there were some things I saw that made me go “wtf?” Cop sister takes on the identity of her sister to investigate what led to her sisters death, but while in the role we discover the younger sister was a disgusting harlot of a woman, sleeping around to get promoted, worked as a nightclub girl AKA prostitute to get money, was involved with a terrorist group called Green World, was working with a really shady man played by Derek Kwok, all of this while dating Bosco Wong’s HK police officer. As each revelation was revealed it just made me feel less and less sympathy for the younger sister because she was doing some real shady crap.

Bosco’s character is a real idiot as well because if he really was a good boyfriend he should have been able to immediately tell that the girl was not the same girl as his girlfriend as there were too many contradictions in everything she does. I kept screaming at my TV telling him to just bug her and find out what she was doing because that would have sorted out so many misunderstandings early.

Meanwhile, it seemed every single man was swooning over her, trying to hit on her or show general interest. She is pretty, no doubt, but I feel she was not THAT pretty, I found it all too unbelievable. The drama slowly became this sausagefest with her as the only taco, and I had to keep cringing at this.

What also made me start to hate Chrissie Chau’s character was how she used her Kevin Chu and Alex Fong. Alex Fong plays her boyfriend while she was in Singapore, but we do not know what their actual relationship is until many episodes later. After she goes to Hong Kong undercover she constantly asked him for his hacking services, and he becomes fed up because he was constantly waiting for her to come home, so he started dating somebody else. She finds out in a scene when he was in Hong Kong with his new girlfriend, but I couldn’t find myself blaming him. Suddenly, she shifts her attention to Kevin Chu, who was her sister’s best friend and just so happened to also be a hacker! Kevin actually worked out earlier on that Chrissie was not the younger sister, so she came clean with her cop identity and asked him to help her find the killers. She spent so many scenes just asking him to hack for her and do really dangerous reconnaissance, tasks that had him nearly get his organs harvested twice, and yet he still listens to her commands. I shook my head every time I saw a scene with them both and she asks him to hack this or be bait for that. Just stop it, please!

This drama is not complete yet so we’ll see how it fairs in the later episodes, but for now it is just a crapfest. Maybe we find out the younger sister was also a member of an assassin guild and had a secret child with one of the men? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Update:

I have finished watching this drama and the ending was so abrupt it had me going “what the f…”. So there is a huge plot twist where the younger sister was not dead but was pretending so she could plot her way to taking over her elder sister’s identity. Why? Because she wanted to escape her criminal past, and pinning all her crimes on her elder sister before killing her and taking place was her method of doing it. What this essentially means is that the whole premise of the drama has been a lie to us and a massive waste of time, because the whole reason the elder sister was in Hong Kong was to avenge her sister, and suddenly “Oh actually the sister ain’t dead, lol”.

Now there are so many plotholes that blew my mind that I had to ask how little the writers were paid. At the beginning of the drama we see the corpse of the younger sister, we see they have the same appearance and everything and even the coroner confirmed the DNA as well. So how did she fake this death? They visit a doctor and he explained how it was possible the younger sister donated bone marrow to someone so when the blood was tested for DNA it would have the sister’s DNA in there. Okay fine, but how did they explain the same appearance of the corpse as it was clearly the twin. They don’t mention this at all, no plastic surgery or anything, they simply brush it off as “oh yeah bone marrow.” They brought up the possibility of the coroner being unreliable, but if so why would they need the bone marrow transplant excuse? The coroner could just make it up, so it made noooo sense.

The drama tried to wrap up too quickly at the end. We spend the first 20 episodes slowly uncovering the nonsense plot the drama introduced, but it spends the last 4 episodes trying to quickly wrap everything up, with the final episode feeling especially rushed as they tried to cram as many resolutions in there as possible. Right at the end the sisters face off in an elevator and the younger sister forces the elder to shoot her to death. We see this reveal later when Bosco runs to the elevator and the doors open to show the younger sister dead, but we see that the elder sister doesn’t even shed a tear for her sibling and just walks out, says a few words while looking back snd then the drama ends. What?

But the biggest sin this drama threw at me was the death of Kevin Chu. I mean his acting was average but I felt bad for the idiot constantly putting his life in danger for the elder sister. He laters gets kidnapped and becomes paralyzed from the neck down, which really had me angry at the elder sister. But the last straw was when the drama has the younger sister appear to him while he was in his wheelchair and just outright murders him because he thought the elder sister was “better”. Come on give that guy a break! For that sin alone, this drama is not worth rewatching even as a joke.

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Good crime drama plot out of HK, but acting is so bad from entire cast.

Dead Ringer is an HK crime drama about Wei Xiao Chen, a Chinese-American female captain who leads a SWAT team that breaks up the base of a human trafficking syndicate and discovers the body of a woman who turns out to be her twin sister, Liang Xi. Xiao Chen is devastated and vows to spend the rest of her life tracking down the truth behind her sister’s murder.

Wen Xiao Chen disguised as her twin sister and came to Hong Kong to investigate her death. As she unravels the evidence, surprising twists happen when her twin sister, Liang Xi, is not dead. Her sister was involved in money laundry and did illegal kinds of stuff.

The plot is interesting, but the acting was bad from the entire ensemble, especially the FL, Chrissie Lau, and Raymond Wong. They both cannot act. Serious and emotional, she has the same stoic face without much emotion. Raymond Wong is the worst actor I have seen out of HK drama.

I give it a 6.0 because the acting of the entire cast is below mediocre. The production quality is much better than those from Mainland China, with bright light, and everyone is white, especially in historical/Xian Xia costume dramas.

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