Sunny is a skilled debt collector who works for the syndicate run by the Wong Family. One day, a street fortune-teller near his office says to him, “Unless you quit your current job, you won’t escape from a misfortune which will bring you death.” Being a good-tempered person by nature, Sunny prefers to make people pay with sincerity rather than resorting to violence or threat, and so he starts to think of quitting the gangster business and making a peaceful home with Eva, his girlfriend of 3 years, after hearing this fortune-telling. Soon after that, he meets a sick mother and her son during one of his collection rounds, and ends up taking care of them. The boy’s father, Ah-niu, is also in debt to the Ting Family, the enemy to the Wong Family, and is currently missing. Ongoing in the background is the criminal case of his disappearance. While trying to protect the boy, Sunny and his buddies follow the trail of Ah-niu.

The director James LEE is famous in Japan for The Beautiful Washing Machine (2004; this movie is mentioned in The Collector in a self-deprecating manner) and Before We Fall in Love Again (2006). While making independent art-house films which have led the “Malaysian New Wave”, Lee is also efficient at directing entertaining movies. He is also a prolific film director. The Collector is an authentic martial arts comedy with the attractive kung-fu action scenes even outperforming Hong Kong films. Yet still, its larger-than-life characters and innocent and friendly humor are effective like the spices of tropical Malaysia. Both the last but one horror film Sini Ada Hantu (2011) and the last film Petaling Street Warriors (2011, Co-director) became hits in Malaysia. Although The Collector can be categorized with the latter as a commercial film, the protagonist portrayed by Sunny Pang has something in common with Or Kia, the main character of an artistic gangster film Call If You Need Me (2009). It will be interesting to compare the different styles of both films.