Family Heir (2024)

Haha predictable but entertaining, shame the ending sucks!

Man this is another run-of-the-mill rich family with typical rich family problems of siblings fighting over inheritance with the typical plot twists that are involved. This has the same formula except that it is still a very entertaining watch. We have a star studded cast led by Charmaine Sheh as the eldest grand daughter of the Yo family (or Qiu if you’re Mando) and we watch how her younger male cousin played by none other than Him Law trying to get in her way and usurp the title of hier. If you wanted to watch a drama to really hate Him Law then this is the perfect one to watch. He is a huge massive anus of a person and I spend most of my time watching the drama imagining him on fire.

Some of the plot reveals were so predictable and came about so rapidly that I found myself laughing at it all. The 2nd eldest son played by Gallen Lo has a great business sense but got into so much mischief in the past that it affected his wives (yes that’s correct, wives) and kids. Oh man, watch it to see what I mean. Let’s just say the 2nd wife has some loose lips.

In any case, I am enjoying how ridiculous everything in this drama is. As always, Raymond Lam is the coolest guy in the drama and has the best scenes. Can’t wait for the final episodes!

Update: I completed watching this ages ago but I had to watch it again to make sure before I complete this review and yes... it is terrible. It had such a good start, but the story and characters became so ridiculous that I stopped caring.

Let's start with the worst person in the show, and no it is not the character played by Him Law. It is actually the Gallen's 2nd wife played by Betsy Cheung. We spent the start of the drama thinking she was so nice and was a victim of constant bullying from Gallen's 1st wife , but later we discovered she was the biggest piece of human trash in the drama. In the past while Gallen only had one wife played by Candice Yu, he had an affair with Betsy Cheung. Later, Candice gave birth to a daughter and realised that her husband could not become the Yo family successor due to the traditional views of her father-in-law. At the same time, Betsy became pregnant with twins, and coincidentally one of the twins was a boy (Him Law). So, Gallen and Candice made a deal with Betsy to allow her to join the Yo family, but in return Betsy would have to surrender her son to Candice and take Candice's daughter as her own, officially making Betsy twins girls while Candice had a son, all this so Gallen could lay claim as successor to the family business. How convenient they became pregnant can gave birth at the same time.

You would think Betsy, as the third-party, agreeing to giving up her son for money and status would already making her a shitty mother, but it gets worse. She was afraid her daughter from the twin birth would be treated poorly by the 1st wife, so she swapped her daughter with Candice's just in case. This led to Candice treating Betsy's daughter as if it was her own and spoiling her. So in essence, she gave up BOTH her children.

And it gets even worse. Those twins are later found out to not even be Gallen's kids. In the past, while she was having an affair with Gallen, she was also sleeping with Raymond Lam's father played by Hugo Ng, making the twins half-siblings to Raymond. When I discovered all of those things, it just showed how awful Betsy was as a person, so the show trying to show her in sympathetic light just annoyed me so much. Candice is loud and obnoxious for sure, throwing her Princess tantrums when she cannot get what she wanted, but she was at least not a scheming anus like Betsy. I hated Betsy so much and was disappointed her ending did not result in her death.

Him Law here was a textbook psychopath. Everything he ever did was driven by intense selfishness and to serve his own ego. When he later discovered he was not Gallen's son, he got over it really quickly and then did everything in his power to not let this information leak out to Gallen because he did not want to lose everything. He also purposely did not share a fire hazard report to Charmaine so that she would get into trouble and have to spend time in prison. He also kept making stupid mistakes that most rational people would not do, like return to a crime scene. When Gallen found out Him was not his son, they gotinto a struggle , which led to Him murdering his father with a glass ornament in Gallen's office. Later, Him returns to the office at night to find the ornament, but he is caught by the police. Dumbass. His ending was too good for him as he got hit by a van while trying to make a getaway and entered a coma, with the drama ending with him still comatose. Just kill him already!

One of the points that made me feel really sick was Toby Leung declaring her love for Raymond. We later discovered that she was Raymond's half-sister when she did DNA analysis, and we found her throwing up after discovering she was in love with her own brother. That really made my stomach turn when I found out, like the writers were out of their minds when they wrote that into the drama. She later ends up getting killed by Him Law when she threatened to reveal their true parentage and mess up Him's plans, so he smacked her into the water and watched her slowly drown.

I am most disappointed with the character of the eldest brother played Benz Hui. He was divorced from his first wife, Charmaine's mother, and managed to bag himself a younger wife played by Dada Chan. He mentioned many times that he did not want to take over the family business and would not fight for it, but I thought this was a ruse and he was quietly plotting behind the scenes to take over, like Benz is known to do in other dramas, but NO! He is just useless! He later discovered that his daughter was made go to prison by the machinations of Him Law, but it required Charmaine saying, "You know this and you won't sit on the board to help me fight them?", so he reluctantly became Vice-Chairman on the board. And just when I thought maybe he would stand up and protect Charmaine in his new position, his new wife ends up having a miscarriage and nearly gets herself and Candice killed, so he decided to step down as Vice-Chairman to spend time looking after his wife, leaving Charmaine to fend for herself. Father of the f'ing year here. His ending was that his wife ran away because of the guilt she felt for the miscarriage and it ended with Benz still looking for her. WTF?

And don't think Charmaine was any better. Her role in this is almost only as eye candy as she does almost nothing significant and was basically this person that got shoved around and had thing happening around her or to her with not much she could do about it. She doesn't scheme, she doesn't make plan A and plan B or contingencies to deal with stuff, all she does is "I will do this and that's it" and then when the crap hits the fan oh no, she has no plan to get out of it. Raymond had to save her a few times, but she inevitably still had to go to prison for a few weeks thanks to the fire hazard incident. She only did a few things near the end of the drama, but only because Raymond armed her with knowledge she could use to attack with. Her character was just fodder for the plot to progress, and that makes me sad because she is a great actor completely wasted.

The best character is played by Raymond Lam. He played a lawyer and former boyfriend of Charmaine. They broke up because he was caught making out with another woman in his car but lied to Charmaine about it when she caught him in the act. She could not forgive his cheating so broke up with him, but there were many opportunities they could have gotten back together but never would because of this thorn in Charmaine's mind. He still deeply cares about her and would do everything in his power to help her whenever she got into trouble. I felt so bad for him when he discovered from Hugo Ng that Him Law was his half-brother, because Raymond really despised Him especially after finding out Charmaine went to prison because Him withheld information. However, despite being my favourite character in the drama, I still believe he doesn't deserve to be with Charmaine, and this is because of Raymond Wong. Raymond Wong plays a rich guy who had helped Charmaine a lot and also had feelings for her. He did nothing but support her in the drama and was an overall great guy. At the end when the van hit Him Law that left him comatose, it should have also hit Charmaine but Wong pulled her out of the way and took the van hit in her place. He survived it and so more than deserves to be with Charmaine. Plus with all the history between Raymond Lam's family and her, this would be for the best.

As for the other characters, they were just there, just like Jeannie Chan who played Candice's actual daughter. She just existed and left no lasting impression at all. Her performance here was akin to her performance The Beauty of War, except less annoying because she was not a massive push over. Even the legendary Lau Kong never had a chance to shine as he only had a few episodes to act in before he died in the drama. The worst use of a "cameo" was with Wilson Tsui, who played a crazy homeless guy and spoke to Him Law while Him was having his bouts of depression in his Lamborghini. Wilson appeared more than once so it was not really a cameo, but he served NOOO purpose at all. Why bring him in if it served no purpose?

This drama ends with Charmaine and Raymond Wong at a church getting married when suddenly somebody opened the church doors and a silhouette of somebody - I am assuming Raymond Lam - was there to stop it. It ends there but I can tell you now we do not need a direct sequel to this drama. It was overall terrible and just average at best. Raymond Lam's star power really can pull things back from the abyss but it cannot elevate this pile of vomit above average, so much so that this is not worth a rewatch like I did as I was speechless the first time and needed to make sure I didn't hallucinate the entire thing. The first drama with Tavia Yeung and Julian Cheung was vastly superior.

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