Comedy with errors has its heart in the right place

A sweet grandmother (Wang Man-chiao) wants only the best for her gay grandson, Mao Mao (Austin Lin, 2022's My Best Friend's Breakfast), so she organizes a traditional wedding for him. There's just one problem: Mao Mao is dead. Granny throws a ghost wedding, in which the other groom is Ming-han (Greg Hsu, 2019's A Sun), a homophobic, misogynistic cop who accidentally picks up the red packet Granny and her cohorts planted on the street. At the time, Ming-han was scrounging for evidence from a car chase involving a drug dealer he and his partner, Tzu-ching (Gingle Wang, 2021's Till We Meet Again), were after. He may be hitting on her, and he's mostly sure she's too pretty to be a "real" cop.

That's the short version of Cheng Wei-hao's Marry My Dead Body, a ghost comedy that's already an enormous hit at home in Taiwan and one that could see similar success in Hong Kong if preview audiences are any indication. That said, there are plenty among us who may not take kindly to the retrograde imaging and a plot entirely dependent on gay panic jokes to get to its point.

Best known for the 2015 horror film The Tag-Along and its sequel from two years later, Cheng steps out of his comfort zone with Marry My Dead Body, and, in fairness, his heart is in the right place. It's just that to deliver a message of tolerance, Cheng and his army of writers have piled stereotype upon stereotype, none of which are delivered ironically or winkingly enough to truly be anything beyond stereotype. The last thing we need to see is another pudgy, lisping, effeminate gay man who's also a sad, emotional eater.

Mixing Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990), any Eddie Murphy buddy comedy from the 1980s, and Taiwan folklore, Marry My Dead Body sends Ming-han on a four-pronged mission: to find the drug dealer he was looking for when a clumsy bit of police work got him demoted to a small, suburban precinct; salvage his career; solve the mystery of the car accident that killed the ghost husband he's been saddled with; and finally, send said husband to a happy reincarnation. As it turns out, Mao Mao is a great help when it comes to solving crimes; and being forced to see Mao Mao — and as a bonus, Tzu-ching — for his human qualities ultimately makes Ming-han himself a better person.

Cheng and Co.'s playful mix of superstition and modern sensibilities isn't inherently clumsy. As in The Tag-Along, the director uses myth and (urban) legend as his jumping-off point for a contemporary genre picture. Here, rather than rooting Granny's desire for a ghost marriage in shame, it's based on joy — that at least Mao Mao will finally be able to marry the man he wanted to. However, making the circumstances of the ghost wedding tragic, and trapping Mao Mao in an unhappy marriage smacks of "burying your gays", the recurring trope in which LGBTQ characters meet fates that include general unhappiness, illness, loneliness, insanity and, of course, death.

But then we're supposed to see Ming-han's offensive behavior as just that — laughably backwards — and feel a sense of catharsis in the fact that he comes out of his investigative partnership a more understanding man: one who's proud to have his morning coffee from a mug with a rainbow flag on it.

Marry My Dead Body is facile in its message and clunky in its execution, but its heart is in the right place, and there's something to be said for that.