The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World

The inherently intriguing nature of The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World‘s subject matter is squandered time and time again by director Weijun Chen, as – in an effort to fill the 80-minute running time – the filmmaker has suffused the proceedings with a mind-numbing amount of entirely superfluous tangents and elements. At the movie’s core is, of course, the story of West Lake Restaurant, which, though in operation for just a few years, has established itself as the largest eatery on the planet (it’s so enormous, in fact, that certain employees actually live there). And while Chen does spend some time exploring the day-to-day operation of the restaurant, including a rags-to-riches profile of the establishment’s owner, Qin Linzi, the director devotes the lion’s share of screen time to increasingly pointless stories about some of the customers that have celebrated milestones within the building’s expansive walls (eg a couple gets married, an elderly woman turns 70, etc, etc). It’s virtually impossible to care about any of these people and the continued inclusion of their tales is nothing short of baffling, with Chen’s decision to casually brush past the film’s few marginally interesting elements a head-scratcher of almost epic proportions (ie Linzi makes a reference to her abusive father; why not explore that in some detail rather than the couple looking to celebrate their baby’s birth?) That the movie boasts several unusually unpleasant instances of certain animals being killed (eg fish, ducks, snakes) and, in some cases, tortured serves only to alienate the viewer even further, and it’s ultimately impossible to view The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World as anything more than an interminable misfire.

*1/2 out of ****