The Mermaid is a 2016 Chinese movie that broke a ton of box office records in China. It’s a romantic comedy about a mermaid named Shan who is supposed to seduce and kill a destructive billionaire named Xuan. Naturally Shan falls in love with Xuan (despite the fact that he has no redeeming qualities until well into the movie) so she has to persuade him instead, and they both have to fight off his evil business partner/girlfriend. I’m fairly certain that some of the charm of this movie was lost in both linguistic and cultural translation, but I can’t deny that not only did I laugh a lot but I rewatched one particularly funny scene again the next day.

There’s a couple of things you need to know before venturing into this movie. The first is that a lot of it is broadly played but brilliantly constructed slapstick. I’m the wrong audience for this, because physically slapstick comedy just makes me wince in sympathy. However, I cannot deny that if slapstick is your thing, this is AMAZING. The standouts slapstick-wise are a scene in which Shan tries to kill Xuan and is constantly stymied as Xuan, who doesn’t know she’s there, dances to a song with the lyrics:

Being invincible is so so lonely

Being invincible is so so empty

When I’m alone at the peak, cold wind constantly blows

My loneliness – who can understand?

The second slapstick sequence involves a mer-Octopus (named ‘Octopus’) having to work in disguise as a hibachi chef. If you don’t like slapstick you won’t be able to watch this scene at all. If you do, it will be the most brilliant thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

The other thing you should know is that in the service of pounding the message “DON’T HURT THE ENVIRONMENT” into our heads (a message I heartily endorse), the filmmakers show some documentary footage of animals being killed or injured in the name of greed (they weren’t killed for the movie; it’s reused footage). These two sequences, one at the very beginning and one near the end, are brief but graphic. You can fast forward through them without missing any story, but still, there they are. There’s also a very brutal battle sequence near the end in which mermaids are hunted, captured, and in many cases killed. It’s a huge tonal switch from the goofy comedy of the rest of the movie.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, I can say that there was a lot I liked about this movie. Xuan is a horrible person who flunks my “be kind to the waiter” test and who assumes that every woman he meets is a prostitute. He’s mystified by Shan because he keeps trying to give her huge amounts of money and she keeps rejecting it. He’s horrible to everyone who works for him or around him. And yet, he has a nice chemistry with Shan, and really does try to fix the problems he’s created. His proposal to Shan, on their second date, is weirdly sweet. When she points out that this is too fast, he says,

“I have to make decisions involving billions of dollars in a matter of minutes. I took the whole night to think about this!”

The main villain of the movie is not Xuan, but rather his business partner/girlfriend, Ruolan. I hated the jealous girlfriend thing, and the evil business-woman cliche. Also, I’m not even sure she was Xuan’s girlfriend, because I was often confused with regard to their relationship status. However, I did very much enjoy the increasing bizarreness of her outfits. By the time Ruolan showed up in a leather bustier and spike heels firing a rocket launcher out of a helicopter door I had to respect her as having reached some kind of peak “I am sexy and murderous” level. Seriously, that was AMAZING. It was neither good nor bad – just AMAZING. It’s not the kind of thing one sees every day.

Shan is basically a manic pixie dream girl but with her own agenda – unlike most manic pixie dream girls, her role is to save her people, not cheer up a dude, although she has to cheer up the dude to accomplish her goal. The plot requires that she try to entice Xuan to her home without letting him know that she’s a mermaid (she waddles around on her fins which are stuffed into boots, and she skateboards a lot – you just have to take my word for this). Then she falls for him for real and gets horribly injured so that Xuan can be heroic. For a long time she drives the story but eventually her character loses control of the narrative and it becomes more about the decisions of guys and also of Ruolan. This is unfortunate.

There are scenes I will treasure forever – the best of which involving the hapless Xuan trying to convince two police officers that he’s been kidnapped by a mermaid, and their literal and hilarious drawings of what he describes. The climactic callbacks to what seemed like throwaway gags from the beginning of the movie were priceless. So was the revelation that Thou Shalt Not Mess With Old Lady Mermaids, for They Shall Fuck You Up, Yeah Verily.

I have so many questions. What was with the terrible special effects? What are we supposed to think of the guy who apparently laughs himself to death at the beginning? Do Shan and Xuan ever have sex, and if so, how? Does Xuan have any redeeming qualities other than a touching backstory and a cute face? Is this story incredibly sexist ? (Yes, it is). What is the air bubble thing around Xuan’s head at the end? I dunno. At some point I just stopped worrying about it. It is what it is.

I’m not even sure how to grade this. I don’t know how to process it. Like Xuan, I can only say, “What happened?” The ending is very sweet and I support the message that love transcends all and that we should be good to the environment and that old lady mermaids are badass. The movie is a brisk 94 minutes and whatever else I can say about it, it sure is entertaining! I’m giving it a very confused B- .