Many years ago when I first visited the USA, a friend of mine living there gave me an advice that I recollect every time I travel abroad – when visiting an Indian Restaurant outside India to peep in first to see if there are more foreigners than Indians eating there, if so to stay away from that place as it would’ve been tailored for their taste-buds and not ours. I remembered this when I was seeing Crazy Rich Asians (2018), a movie that got released two months ago in the USA and was receiving rave reviews there.

The story is about a Chinese American Lady Rachel Chu, an economics professor in New York visiting the family of her boyfriend Nick Young (played by Henry Golding) in Singapore. Rachel finds it difficult to be accepted by Nick’s family as they are super rich and near royalty there. That’s all, there is no twist or drama. It will be cliché to call out most things in the film to be a cliché, so I will not say so.

I was looking forward to the film because of the heroine Constance Wu, who I liked in her role in the TV Series “Fresh Off the Boat” and she hasn’t disappointed the audience with her grounded performance as Rachel Chu. Apart from her, Awkwafina who appeared as a friend of Rachel the role of Rachel’s friend and Nico Santos from Superstore TV series who comes as Nick’s (the hero) second cousin, left their mark.  We couldn’t relate to most of the characters especially the lead pair, as we get told very little about them; in fact, Nick’s sister character got a longer definition than Nick.

The movie could very well have been financed by Singapore’s Tourism department as promoting Singapore was something it gets done well. Lastly, the movie should’ve been called Crazy Rich Chinese (I am not implying in any way only the Chinese are Crazy and Rich) as we hardly see other Asian races like Indians represented in the film.

Crazy Rich Asians – Constance Wu as Rachel Chu, Henry Golding as Nick Young, Michelle Yeoh as Eleanor Young (Mother of Nick), Awkwafina as Goh Peik Lin(Rachel’s Friend) and Nico Santos (Nick’s second cousin)

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