影片介绍
Love it or hate it – National Service (NS) is an indelible part of the Singapore identity, and what better way on this forty-fifth anniversary of NS to celebrate the special place that it has in every Singaporean than to make a movie about it. So Jack Neo has done just that, embarking on his most ambitious (and certainly his most expensive) film ever that attempts to tell an NS story able to resonate with both the younger and the older generation who have been through that life-changing experience.
‘Ah Boys to Men’ is the name of Neo’s film, split into two parts after the filmmaker realised that he just had too much material to fit into one single movie. In this first-parter, Neo largely focuses on overcoming the psychological barrier that accompanies every new recruit’s entry into Basic Military Training (BMT), the barrier of fear, trepidation, reluctance and just general resistance to the sacrifice of freedom and two years of one’s prime teenage years.
The protagonist here is Ken Chow (Joshua Tan), a headstrong and impulsive rich kid who is forced to put his plans to study abroad on hold due to NS commitments. As such, he starts off hating even the thought of NS, and while his father (Liu Qianyi) tries to convince him to think positively about it, his mother (Irene Ang) busies herself trying to find ways for her son to skip NS – even going to the extent of approaching their Member of Parliament (MP).
To complicate matters further, his plans to go overseas included his girlfriend, who would also be heading overseas for academic reasons. Yet as the Government would have it, his application for deferment is denied, leaving him Tekong-bound in body but certainly not in spirit. Ditto for his fellow enlistees ‘Lobang’ (Wang Weiliang) and ‘I P Man’ (Noah Yap), the former a particularly resourceful and enterprising buddy who sells charged spare handphone batteries to his section mates.
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