China, comedy, Da Peng, David Wang, Gia Jin, Honey Money Phony, Li Xueqin, movies, reviews, Richie Ren, Song Muzi, Sunny Sun, Wang Hao, Xiao Ai, Yi Yunhe
January 6, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Da Peng
Mandarin with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in the fictional city of Aoo Kang, China, the comedy film “Honey Money Phony” features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with some black people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: An employee from an insurance company teams up with con artists to get back the money that her ex-boyfriend stole from her.
Culture Audience: “Honey Money Phony” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and comedies that are intentionally silly but might annoy some viewers expecting a more entertaining movie.
“Honey Money Phony” is a lightweight comedy that falls short of its potential. The story (about people trying to retrieve stolen money from a con artist) gets convoluted and dull very quickly. The performances are adequate while the plot spirals into folly. The movie is intentionally absurdist, but the movie has an uneven tone of being overly sappy while attempting to be edgy. It’s a combination that just doesn’t work for this film.
Directed by Da Peng and written by Su Biao, “Honey Money Phony” (which takes place in the fictional city of Aoo Kang, China) has a simple concept that becomes stretched out and muddled by a series of sloppily staged shenanigans. The main characters are introduced in a somewhat jumbled way. Other characters with smaller roles come in and out of the story and end up being quite useless to the plot. “Honey Money Phony” isn’t exactly fun to watch, unless you think it’s fun to watch characters repeatedly make fools out of themselves in their bungled attempts to do whatever they’re doing in incoherent scenes.
The protagonist of “Honey Money Phony” is Lin Quinlang (played by Gia Jin), a 29-year-old woman who works as an insurance company employee. Quinlang is in debt for about ¥200,000 (which is a little more than $27,000 in U.S. dollars in the mid-2020s) because an ex-boyfriend named Zhang Zi Jun (played by Wang Hao) scammed her out of this money. A flashback shows that Jun lied to her and told her that he lost all of his college tuition money. Quinlang took out a ¥200,000 loan and gave the money to Jun, who then promptly broke up with her and disappeared from her life.
An early montage in the film shows that in addition to her main job at the insurance company, Quinlang has “side hustle” gigs as a waitress, flyer distributor, dog walker and being a social media personality called the Frugal Fairy, who gives advice on how to save money. In voiceover narration, Quinlang says that she doesn’t make enough money from her Frugal Fairy videos to cover the fees charged for her to be a member of the social media platform where she posts the videos.
Quinlang’s closest friend is Dong Xiaohui (played by Li Xueqin), a former co-worker at the insurance company. The movie has a rushed explanation that in the recent past, Xiaohui got caught embezzling money from the insurance company and was fired. Xiaohui now has to pay back the money that she owes from the embezzlement.
And the way that Xiaohui is getting money is by continuing to commit fraud. Her scam is pretending to be a blind woman, walking out on a street in front of car, and falling down, in order to fool the driver into thinking that the car hit her. Xiaohui even carries fake blood with her to quickly put on herself before the driver gets out of the car to see if she is hurt. As part of the scam, Xiaohui persuades the driver (who is usually shocked and nervous) to give her money to get “medical treatment” and so she won’t report this “accident.”
“Honey Money Phony” has a very off-putting way in how it makes Xiaohui’s scamming look acceptable, like it’s all one big joke. There’s no good reason for why the movie has this attitude that Xiaohui can be excused for her scamming, but anyone who scams Quinlang is “wrong” and should be punished. It’s all very hypocritical and stupid.
One day, Quinlang becomes the victim of another scam in a poorly staged scenario that looks very unrealistic in the movie. Quinlang gets a phone call from a man claiming to work for the company where she posts her social media videos. The caller tells Quinlang that her social media account is suspended because she put her personal banking information online so viewers could make direct deposits to her account.
When Quinlang says that this is a common practice for social media influencers, the caller says it’s still against the company policy. The caller than says that Quinlang can fix the problem by paying a fine and her social media account will be reactivated. The man gives her an account number where she can transfer the money to pay the fine. Quinlang doesn’t actually check to see if her account is suspended. She just takes this stranger’s word for it. How idiotic is that?
Quinlang transfers the money and immediately regrets it. She rushes over to a bank, where a friend works, and asks the friend to look up the name of the person who owns the account while Quinlang still has the caller on the phone. The friend tells her the account is owned by someone named Ouyang Hui (played by Sunny Sun), who is surprised that Quinlang found out his identity so quickly. An angry Quinlang threatens to expose him.
But in this ridiculous movie, Quinlang ends up telling Hui about how she was scammed out of ¥200,000 by her ex-boyfriend Jun. Hui makes a deal with Quinlang that he will return her money for the “suspension fine” fraud, and he will help her get her money back from Jun if she doesn’t report Hui to the authorities. It should come as no surprise that Quinlang and Hui become romantically attracted to each other, although the cast members playing these characters don’t have believable romantic chemistry with each other.
Two other people eventually join this plot to get the money back from Jun: Quinlang’s friend Xiaohui; Hui’s uncle Bai Shitong (played by David Wang), who is Hui’s con-artist “mentor”; and Hai Ou (played by Ada Liu), another victim conned by Jun. Because Jun is a ladies’ man who seduces women out of their money, you can easily guess what kind of setup will happen, since Jun has never met Xiaohui before. Someone named Frank (played by Song Muzi) is also part of the story.
“Honey Money Phony” gets distracted with some nonsensical sublots that are supposed to be hilarious but quickly grow tiresome. There’s a running joke that Quinlang and Hui keep encountering a weird photographer (played by Yi Yunhe), who has salivary glands that are so over-active, he drenches people in saliva whenever he talks to them. By the end of a conversation with him, people literally look like they’ve been dunked in a swimming pool.
This over-exaggerated sight gag would be funnier if “Honey Money Phony” went full-tilt into slapstick comedy. But the movie keeps going back into sob story territory when it tells more information about Quinlang and Hui. Quinlang says she moved to Aoo Kang to start fresh after being fired from her previous job for reporting the boss who sexually harassed her. A flashback shows that when she met Jun at a tennis court, he offered to help her with legal problems that she had because she broke a non-compete clause in the contract she had with a previous job.
Hui also has a backstory that is supposed to make him look more sympathetic. It has to do with Hui being an illegitimate child whose father (played by Xiao Ai, in a brief flashback) abandoned Hui when Hui was a child. Shitong is supposed to be Hui’s uncle, but the movie has a repetitive off-kilter joke that Quinlang somehow thinks that Hui and Shitong are lovers. “Honey Money Phony” is mostly goofy, but throwing in incest jokes just seems jarringly out-of-place. It’s an example of how the movie can’t decide if it wants to be edgy or tender.
The cast members seem to be doing the best that they can with a screenplay and direction that aren’t very good. It might be hard for some viewers to relate to Quinlang because she’s so gullible when it comes to being scammed out of her money—even though insurance company workers are trained on how to spot scams, and Quinlang gives financial advice as a social media “influencer.” One of the better performances in the cast comes from Li, who has skilled comedic timing in her role as Xiaohui, although this character is fairly unlikable in how she’s a con artist too.
“Honey Money Phony” overstays its welcome with two separate epilogues. In one of these epilogues, Richie Ren has a cameo as himself in a concert scene that looks very hokey. By the time the second epilogue rolls around, most viewers will just want the film to end once and for all. And unfortunately, “Honey Money Phony” is the type of disappointing movie that is easily forgotten not long after seeing it.
CMC Pictures released “Honey Money Phony” in select U.S. cinemas on January 3, 2025. The movie was released in China on December 31, 2024.