The movie tried to portrait the life of a simple, kind and helpful Hong Kong leftist, Ah Kong ("Kong" used the same Chinese character in Hong Kong), who worked in a cinema throughout his life, time frame spanning from the liberation of China in 1949 to the anti-British riot in 1967, stock market crash in 1973, China reform during the 1990s, handover of Hong Kong in 1997, outbreak of SARS of 2003 and even the Olympics in 2008.
The ambition was strong, but the character Ah Kong was so unreal and superficial that it was difficult to find any resonance in the audience, the patriotism shown by Ah Kong was so manipulated that it was simply unreal. While it's easy to find some nice people around in Hong Kong, the selflessness of Ah Kong was definitely fallacious to a point that it was easy to imagine it existed in the imagination of the director only.
The director also downplayed or just ignored some other very important events for Hong Kong leftists in the last century, namely the notorious Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976 and the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Both events were absolutely important and shaped many leftists' hearts and psychology, no leftists' stories can be told without mentioning these two events.
This story is unfortunately amateurish when compared to the movies directed by Fruit Chan in terms of Hong Kong historical background.
