It’s possible that no Hollywood romantic comedy has hit the big screen bearing more expectations than Crazy Rich Asians. It’s the first contemporary English-language Hollywood movie with an almost all-Asian cast in a quarter-century (the last was 1993’s The Joy Luck Club). And in risk-averse Hollywood, that means the film’s reception has huge implications for Asian and Asian-American actors and filmmakers in all kinds of genres.
That’s a lot of pressure for any film, but especially a romantic comedy — a genre that’s been sidelined for the past decade and is still considered less artistically important than prestige dramas or big-budget action movies.
Thankfully, all that pressure has pressed this film into a diamond: The phrase Crazy Rich Asians fails to convey just how fun and sweet this film is. Perhaps a more appropriate, if prohibitively lengthy, title would be “The Best Movie About Asian People in Decades and the Best Rom-Com of the Summer.”