This movie is fast food

The premise of this movie is very simple. East vs. West - whose food can truly be considered best? One of the many East-West dichotomy movies to come out in recent years with the main goal of proving that Eastern culture is just as good or in some aspects superior to Western culture.

So let's get the biggest problem with this movie out of the way first: The writing is absolutely atrocious. So much so that I genuinely had to pause the movie more than once to take a second to take in just how badly written those scenes were. Did anyone try to read this script out loud before subjecting the poor cast to this? It reads as if the writers had about two days to put together one of the most generic, over-the-top and cheesy cooking rivalry movies I've ever seen.
The main two actors are really doing their most to turn this into something, anything at all, but not even the admittedly charming rivalry/ friendship between the two main cooks can save this script from its sheer stupidity.
The worst offenders by far are the flashback scenes that get sprinkled in here and there that are also accompanied by some of the most generic violin pieces that give me "googled royalty free sad music" energy.

But with all that being said, despite the massive script problems and the lacklustre everything else, this movie is extremely entertaining. I wasn't bored once while watching it. The movie gets you to genuinely root for the protagonist, admittedly by using cheap and lazy bad guy stereotypes instead of genuine character development, but it does its job.
The cinematography is also at some points genuinely beautiful. I'm pretty sure half the movie's budget was used up only on the orgasmic food porn scenes that make up about half the movie. They're gorgeous to look at.

This and the charming performance of the main actors make rescue this movie from being simply shit and catapult it into "terrible but I can't stop watching" territory. So basically, this is the McDonald's Combo Meal of movies.

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Decent movie with misleading beginning

The biggest flaw of this movie is definitely its first half an hour where the viewer is left to piece together rather important information in scenes that change quite abruptly in what could have been a fun integration of scenes through the eyes of the characters, but ended up just being confusing. The movie significantly improves in the later half and leaves its more experimental scenes behind in favour of what then turned out to be not a rom-com or romance movie but rather a movie about healing, family and past relationships, that culminated in a sad but sweet ending.

The acting is good but not outstanding, same with the score. Kudos that the director at least tried to make this movie a little more avant-garde, even if it didn't always end up working out. The scenes that do work out are nice enough to look at.

For everyone who wants to watch this movie, I'll give you the general advice that the guy in the funky outfits is NOT the ML, it's the MC's brother. This is not immediately apparent and even when the film does explains the familial relationship, it's deliberately vague about it for the sake of the family line plot, but this unfortunately culminated in me being already sort of invested in a ship that would definitely never happen.

If you want to watch the movie on Netflix, the whole thing is only about 1 h 30 min and maybe a good watch for a rainy Sunday afternoon. It's worth a watch.

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