Ah Boys to Men 3: Frogmen (2015)

Plot summary (story synopsis): In an alternate timeline (seriously, this is explained in a voiceover in the movie), the army conscripts in the movie Ah Boys to Men are sent to the Singapore navy's elite Naval Diving Unit (NDU, US Navy SEALs equivalent) instead of the army.

There, they have to survive the tough training, personal conflicts, family problems back home, and finally the dreaded 5-day Hell Week qualification.

***

Writer/director Jack Neo's popular folksy, low-brow, social-commentary, comedy-sketch-based, melodramatic, tell-don't-show, lovable-local-stereotypes, crowd-pleasing style is well known. You either love it or you don't. I won't waste your time criticizing his style in Frogmen except to point out that it is toned down (and therefore less annoying) compared to Ah Boys to Men. Yes, that includes Ken Chow's (Joshua Tan) mother, played by Irene Ang.

What I will do instead is look at Frogmen from a storytelling viewpoint. One fatal flaw in the conception of Frogmen, is the wholesale transfer of the average army conscripts into the elite NDU. It doesn't work.

The "lovable" every-man gang of misfits made sense as generic army conscripts. However it is difficult to believe that such screw-ups are accepted into an elite navy unit. This completely destroys your voluntary suspension of disbelief. Even worse, it gives a false view of the type of men who do join the NDU.

From a dramatic viewpoint, you lose the chance to see the military training of highly-motivated volunteers, instead of your reluctant conscript (if Ken Chow is a skiver, why would he volunteer for a siong special forces unit?). So Frogmen becomes a rehash of the first movie.

Jack Neo should have taken a chance and written in entirely new characters for Frogmen. Instead, he took the easy and safe route by re-using the proven, popular cast from the first movie. (There is one new character in Hei Long (Wesley Wong), a gangster who was brought up in Hong Kong.)

Having made this artistic choice, Jack Neo fails to exploit the audience's familiarity with the characters. Screen time is saved by not having to introduce the characters to the audience. But Jack Neo squanders the saved time by not using it to develop the characters much, except for feeble attempts with Ken Chow, Lobang (Wang Wei Liang) and Hei Long - all in his standard Korean drama style.

Rich-kid Ken Chow's sub plot seems out of place. Lobang's family problems are melodramatic. Hei Long's street gang and parent problems are ridiculous. Aloysius (Maxi Lim) has a satisfying confrontation with bully Hei Long, but the groundwork for it was not properly prepared (Aloysius's surprising reaction is not foreshadowed) and the confrontation therefore feels contrived.

Aside from having misfits enter the NDU, Frogmen further compounds this technical error by having their entire group of 80 men survive and graduate Hell Week. A quick Google search shows that the real pass rate is 30 percent. So instead of showing how tough and elite the NDU is, Jack Neo undersells its selectiveness. It's another missed dramatic opportunity - such a low pass rate would dominate the thoughts and actions of all the men.

Frogmen also doesn't show much about NDU training aside from a first-aid CPR session and a boat-capsize drill. The rest is mainly physical training. While you might not want to publicize any secret techniques, Frogmen doesn't even show the conscripts undergoing scuba diving training (a diving exercise is shown, one that doesn't use scuba equipment). Instead, we only see them as already fully-capable divers at their underwater graduation ceremony. Weapons training? Zero. Communications, navigation, tactics, demolition, escape and evasion, hand-to-hand combat, sky diving, rappelling? Nope.

Bonus gripe: In the action-packed flash-forward at the start of the movie, the terrorists that hijacked a commercial ship and took its crew hostage, are an unnamed group of "international terrorists" whose leader is an American. Nice cop-out to political correctness, Jack.