Since 1991's "Gambler", Wang Jing and Stephen Chow have worked together to create countless classics, including the later "Trick Expert", "Nine Pin Sesame Officer" and "Deer Ding" series, which are still enjoyed by countless fans.
But as the 1990s came to an end, the duo came to an end, but you know what? The last film the two collaborated on, Zhou Xingchi was only a supporting role, and Zhang Jiahui was the main actor, but in the end, the film still won the fourth place in the annual box office, it was "King of a Thousand Kings 2000".
The film is produced by the Best Partner Film Company, and the director, screenwriter and producer are all Wang Jing.
The name "King of a Thousand Kings" comes from his fame as a screenwriter in television, in addition, Wang Jing also made a cameo appearance in the main villain "Jade Flying Dragon" Ferrari.
The story of the film is very simple, detective Liang Kuan (Zhang Jiahui) has great ambitions, not willing to do nothing, helplessly sent by his boss to perform low-level undercover tasks.
Once, after he went undercover on campus to successfully protect Miss Qianjin, his boss agreed to give him a single cass - to collect evidence of the crime of the big old Man Ferrari (Wang Jing).
In the course of the mission, Liang Kuan encounters the female black man "first love" (Lin Xilei), and falls under the pomegranate skirt of the other party, and unconsciously falls into the trap set by Ferrari.
Therefore, Liang Kuan not only could not arrest Ferrari, but also was framed by the "first love" and publicly troubled.
In order to shame Yixue, he is not allowed to ask his girlfriend (Guan Xiumei) brother-in-law, Huang Shihu (Zhou Xingchi), who is known as the "King of a Thousand Kings", for advice, and after several pleadings, the other party finally agrees to re-emerge from the mountain.
The old and cunning Ferrari learned that the yellow lion tiger was going to deal with him, so he deliberately made a card game, in fact, he had secretly kidnapped the three richest people, and planned to use the game to delay time in order to obtain higher profits.
However, before the game began, Huang Shihu was imprisoned by Ferrari, and his wife (Wu Junru) and his sister-in-law went to the rescue after learning about it, and finally successfully found Huang Shihu and the three richest people.
It turned out that Huang Shihu was not unprepared, he deliberately let Liang Kuan attend the poker game, and devised a series of tricks to deceive Ferrari's high-tech surveillance, so that the other side lost all his belongings.
Seeing that his plot was revealed, an angry Ferrari used the "Fat Mantis" to learn nothing, and was finally defeated by the Yellow Lion Tiger with "spray and kill".
"King of a Thousand Kings 2000" won 19.14 million at the box office after its release in the summer of that year, and like "The King of Comedy" and "Glass Bottle", it was the most eye-catching blockbuster movie of the year, but its score on Douban was only 6.9, which was definitely in the middle and lower reaches of the 1990s Star Ye works.
So why did it have a good box office and did not win a good reputation? First, the plot of the film is too thin. The whole storyline is about how the crowd beat Ferrari, and the completion of its transfer points is almost by the stacking of paragraphs, giving people the feeling of flowing operation.
Second, this film originally wanted to highlight Zhang Jiahui, but after Zhou Xingchi appeared, the role began to tilt gradually, so the roles and scenes of the two were not complete.
But at that time, Zhou Xingchi's box office appeal far exceeded Zhang Jiahui, even under the premise of playing a supporting role, he was still able to bring the film to a good box office situation, so it is conceivable that if there is no Zhou Xingchi, how "miserable" this movie will be.
But objectively speaking, the film still has a lot of interesting small details, Wang Jing has always been good at spoofing, so the biggest highlight of "King of a Thousand Kings 2000" is also spoof.
For example, at the beginning, Zhang Jiahui dodged bullets, that is, he took the "bullet time" in "The Matrix" in the shabu; the scene where the beach asked Lin Xilei to call, imitated dawn's big hit mv "Sugar In The Marmalade", and the rest also appeared in the spoof shots of "Chinese Hero", "Sweet Honey" and "Midnight Bell" and Star Ye's tribute to idol Bruce Lee again.
In addition, Wang Jing also joked about his own gambling films, such as "Dragon Five" here becomes "Deaf Five", the card pulling technique is achieved by gluing the tape, and Liang Kuan also spit out that "these are just some deceptive tricks."
Of course, the biggest spoof of the film is the innuendo of the "three richest people", Luo Jiaying's cheng brother, Zeng Jinrong's lin bo and Hu Feng's brother, corresponding to Li Ka-shing, Lin Boxin and Zheng Yutong, respectively.
Let's talk about the film's lead actor Zhang Jiahui. We all know that he has now entered the ranks of first-line actors, in fact, before cooperating with Wang Jing, Zhang Jiahui has not made very eye-catching achievements in the film industry, and even for a certain period of time, he can only star in TV series quality movies.
Later, he met Wang Jing. It just so happened that Wang Jing was looking for a successor to Stephen Chow, he thought that Zhang Jiahui's performance style was "superior", absolutely capable of being a comedy protagonist, so he and Andy Lau partnered with "Gambler 1999" and "Gambler vs Las Vegas", after which Zhang Jiahui's acting career gradually improved.
In order to push Zhang Jiahui again, so this "King of a Thousand Kings 2000" was born. However, due to box office guarantee considerations, Wang Jing decided to invite Zhou Xingchi to match, and finally Xingye made a cameo appearance for a total of 9 days, and the daily remuneration was 1.2 million, which added up to more than 10 million films.
Although the film sold 19.14 million Hong Kong dollars with the help of Stephen Chow's popularity, it actually did not make much money except for this tens of millions of films, so in Wang Jing's view, this is a failed movie.
Despite this, the memory left by the movie is beautiful, at that time, whether it was Zhou Xingchi, who did not have a "white head", Zhang Jiahui, who was still in the stage of comedy performance, or Lin Xilei, who was beautiful and moving, it was so nostalgic.