The Adventure

奇遇

China, 2025, colour, 2.35:1, 128 mins.

Director: Ma Duo 马多.

Rating: 4/10.

Bodyswap comedy, with a handyman “exchanging souls” with his teenage self, is way too broadly played, especially by lead Jia Bing.

STORY

Liangma city, somewhere in China, 8 Dec 2024. Huang Yuqi, 43, is starting to feel middle-aged and that the world is leaving him behind. He hardly sees his wife, Liu Xingzi (Li Meng), who works long hours in a hospital, and his son, Huang Zi (Zhai Zilu), 18, ignores his frequent advice to study hard. He himself works as a handyman at the very corporate Rising Sun Sports & Wellness, where company head Ren Ritian (Yu Yang), a onetime schoolmate, has the idea of using Huang Yuqi as a guinea pig to test a new Anti-Ageing Meal Replacement Powder 减龄代餐粉 the company’s scientists have developed. Cycling home on the night of 9 Dec, Huang Yuqi accidentally discovers Huang Zi is, in fact, a promising school athlete, just like he was when young. As he carries on home, the sky is filled with a magical meteor shower and Huang Yuqi accidentally hits an oncoming cyclist. He wakes up on 10 Dec – but 25 years earlier, in 1999, with his middle-aged self in his 18-year-old body. Huang Yuqi’s father, Huang Jiayuan (Yang Haoyu), runs a small backstreet restaurant, Huang Family Iron Pot Stews, in which they also live. Adjusting to his teenage body, Huang Yuqi (Wang Hao) leaves for school and is joined by his pal Li Panpan (Ma Xudong) and the geeky Ren Ritian (Fei Qiming) who’s being driven there by his wealthy father (Li Naiwen). Outside the school the three into the wild-haired Liu Xingzi (Zheng Hehuizi) and her two female pals; Huang Yuqi, with the benefit of foresight, brags to her that they’ll get married in five years’ time. In class, when the teacher says that “time is as valuable as gold”, the newly confident Huang Yuqi walks out, goes home, and proposes to his father that he takes over managing the family restaurant to realise its potential. Meanwhile, Huang Yuqi’s 18-year-old self has woken up in his middle-aged body in 2024, and doesn’t recognise where he is or even who his son is. After texting himself 25 years earlier, he realises that he and the older Huang Yuqi have “exchanged souls”. He borrows a bike and tries to hit another cyclist in order to travel back to 1999. But all he does is cause a crash – observed by the middle-aged Liu Xingzi, who ticks him off and takes him home. The younger Huang Yuqi is amazed to discover he did marry Liu Xingzi and has a child. Next day he turns up for work in red hair and colourful clothing, and doesn’t immediately recognise his section boss Wang Zhe (Deng Shuai), another former schoolmate whom he treats as if they’re still teenage pals. Wang Zhe and Ren Ritian think his weird behaviour is due to the effects of the anti-ageing powder they tested on him. Meanwhile, back in 1999, Huang Yuqi is lecturing his teachers like a grown man.

REVIEW

Busy Mainland comedian Jia Bing 贾冰, who’s graduated from character to leading roles in recent years, gets a full workout in The Adventure 奇遇, a kind of super-charged version of black comedy The Last Frenzy 末路狂花钱 (2024), in which he also starred, and with several of the same people involved. Though the films’ storylines are completely different – Frenzy was a black comedy about a penny-pincher who goes on a spending spree before he dies, while The Adventure is centred on a middle-aged man who switches souls with his 18-year-old self – the comic styles are the same. As in the earlier film, Jia, 45, is front and centre; but here he has his mugging dial set to 10 the whole time. All this broad comedy – and an emotionally complex plot that’s difficult to become involved with as it flashes back and forth between 2024 and 1999 – is way too much over two hours. The Adventure failed to touch the same nerve among Mainland audiences as Frenzy, taking only a quarter (RMB188 million) of the latter’s hawl.

It’s the first directing job by Ma Duo 马多, 42, who was one of the nine writers on Frenzy, itself the first feature directed by Wu Rina 乌日娜, aka Hu Xi 胡析, who started as a stage actress with the Beijing comedy troupe Ma Hu FunAge 开心麻花 in 2009 before co-directing comic mini-dramas. (She gets a “special thanks” in Frenzy’s end credits.) Among actors who were also in Frenzy, Yu Yang 于洋 (over-playing wildly) and Ma Xudong 马旭东 (more restrained) here play the hero’s epicene boss and younger schoolpal, and well-known comedian Xiaoshenyang 小沈阳 has a nice cameo as a smarmy investor.

The Adventure is another variation on the time-warp/body-swap format that has become a sub-genre of its own in Mainland cinema during the past decade, with titles like Miss Granny 重返20岁 (2015), Goodbye Mr. Loser 夏洛特烦恼 (2015), Suddenly Seventeen 28岁未成年 (2016), Duckweed 乘风破浪 (2017), Never Say Die 羞羞的铁拳 (2017), Take Me to the Moon 带我去月球 (2017), How Long Will I Love U 超时空同居 (2018), Hi, Mom 你好，李焕英 (2021), Give Me Five 哥，你好 (2022), Five Hundred Miles 交换人生 (2023) and Be My Friend 我才不要和你做朋友呢 (2024). Many have been sizeable box-office successes and, given China’s turbo-charged development in the past 40 years, the whole time-travel concept has clearly appealed to a nostalgic strand in Mainland audiences – both young and old for different reasons – that looks back to a simpler (and only recent) past.

Not much is actually made of the 25-year time difference in The Adventure, which mostly concentrates on the characters’ emotional sides. Thanks to a magical meteor shower, middle-aged handyman Huang Yuqi finds himself transported back into the body of his 18-year-old self – and his 18-year-old self transported into his middle-aged body. It’s a nice idea but hard to become involved with, thanks to the constant cross-cutting between the two time periods with their separate plots and constantly having to work out the different emotional connections. The rest of the cast adopt a broad comic style, with Wang Hao 王皓 okay as the teenage hero in a middle-aged man’s body and Yang Haoyu 杨皓宇 good as the hero’s restaurant-owning father, but chronically undervalued actress Li Meng 李梦 is wasted (and unrecognisable) as the hero’s bossy wife in a huge curly wig, with little to do until the later part of the film. When the song My Way is used on the soundtrack – “And now, the end is near…” – one can only sigh in relief after almost two hours.

Technical credits are fine. The hero’s given name, Yuqi, is actually the same characters, reversed, as those of the film’s title (奇遇 qíyù), which literally means a happy accident or fortuitous event.

CREDITS

Presented by Guangzhou Ultra Comedy Pictures (CN), Shanghai Maoyan Pictures (CN), China Film (CN), Wanda Pictures (CN), Zhejiang Hengdian Film (CN), Beijing FunAge Pictures (CN), Shenyang Qide Longdong Qiang Film Industry (CN), Beijing Ultra Comedy Culture Communication (CN). Produced by Guangzhou Ultra Comedy Pictures (CN).

Script: Ma Duo. Story idea: Xin Ming. Photography: Da Jiang [Zhang Jiang]. Editing: Yan Bowen. Editing advice: Tu Yiran. Music: Chen Weijun. Music supervision: Peng Fei, Zhang Jian, Zhao Nan. Art direction: Li Tong. Styling: Lei Shuyu. Sound: Yang Jiang, Zhao Nan. Action: Hao Qi. Visual effects: Meng Meng.

Cast: Jia Bing (Huang Yuqi), Wang Hao (younger Huang Yuqi), Li Meng (Liu Xingzi), Zheng Hehuizi (younger Liu Xingzi), Yang Haoyu (Huang Jiayuan, Huang Yuqi’s father), Zhai Zilu (Huang Zi, Huang Yuqi’s son)), Yu Yang (Ren Ritian), Fei Qiming (younger Ren Ritian), Li Naiwen (Ren Ritian’s father), Ma Xudong (Li Panpan), Deng Shuai (Wang Zhe), Li Zhiliang (street-gang head), Feng Man, Hao Han (street-gang members), Li Fei (Xiaozhang), Xiaoshenyang (Shen, investor).

Release: China, 8 Aug 2025.