With Avengers: Endgame hitting theaters soon (Wednesday, April 24 for those of you watching in Hong Kong), it’s easy to forget that even the actors who now make up the most globally recognizable ensemble in history appeared in some really crappy movies before getting their big breaks.
Captain America had a starring role in the half-assed spoof Not Another Teen Movie, Black Widow played the protagonist’s sister Home Alone 3 (which was irritating and childish, even by Home Alone standards), and Thor got his start on an Australian soap opera. But even amid so much indignity, Ant Man might just take the cake.
Yes, human charm bomb and Ant Man star Paul Rudd once played, of all things, a blonde FBI agent in a Hong Kong action film. (He even dropped a little Cantonese!)
Footage from Rudd’s career-defining role as FBI agent Ian Curtis (no relation to the lead singer of Joy Division) in the 2000 film Gen-X Cops 2 was recently unearthed on the BBC’s late night talk show The Graham Norton Show.
The comparatively restrained original Gen-X Cops was about Hong Kong police officers retrieving a package of deadly explosives from a Japanese terrorist group. The sequel, sometimes also referred to as Gen-Y Cops, follows Rudd and his fellow agents as they look for arms dealers who stole a prototype of a US attack robot, enlisting the help of the cops from the first Gen-X Cops to go undercover as weapons dealers.
The film ends with Rudd menacingly telling the trio of Hong Kong cops — in not-half-bad Cantonese — that they’ll need to come with him. When they protest, saying they thought they’d “settled everything,” Rudd, aka Agent Curtis, disagrees, saying “not quite everything.”
As the high drama stretches to the absolute breaking point, Agent Curtis cracks a smile. “What’s the best bar in Hong Kong?” he asks, revealing his tough-guy act to be a humorous jape, and prompting a round of celebratory high fives, as you can see in the clip below starting around the two-minute mark. (Oh, in case you were actually wondering about the best bars, you could do worse than here, here, and here.)
Rudd’s appearance on The Graham Norton Show was first broadcast on April 12, but the clip showing off Rudd’s linguistic sorta-chops began circulating widely over the weekend, with many Canto speakers dissecting Rudd’s skills in the comments section.
Some were a bit critical, asserting that “whenever a white guy speaks Cantonese it sounds so gross.”
The majority, however, were more encouraging, saying Rudd’s pronunciation was on point (we’d give it about a seven out of 10), with one commenter lamenting that they “miss the days when foreign actors in HK films spoke Cantonese and not out-of-place Mandarin.”
A lot of people also felt the need to point out that “faai di la” translates to “hurry up” or “come on,” and not “drinks are on me,” as it’s presented in the subtitles. (FYI, just in case you feel like whipping that out at LKF, “drinks are on me” in Cantonese is “ngo cing nei yam jau.”)
We here at Coconuts HK, meanwhile, do feel the need to call bullshit on Rudd’s assertion that “nobody really spoke English” on the set of Gen-X Cops 2, given that some of the actors on the film are fluent English speakers, namely Edison Chen and Maggie Q
Things appear to have finally come full circle, with Avengers-era Rudd brushing off his long-dormant Cantonese skills in a clip for Hong Kong Disneyland’s new Ant-Man ride, in which he says “thank you” in Cantonese.
While Rudd’s attempt at Cantonese mostly charmed Hongkongers, people have been so kind towards others’ attempts at speaking the notoriously tricky language.
Noted linguist Mike Tyson, who sparred with Donnie Yen in Ip Man 3, was pilloried online — and spawned a mocking meme — when he flubbed the Cantonese phrase “only speed is unbreakable” (“wai faai but po“), which he mispronounced to sound more like “the Wi-Fi is unbreakable.”
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