www.silverguide.site –

Everyone involved with this feelgood/feelbad prison musical/weepie, and Taiwan’s biggest local box office hit ever, should be put on immediate cinematic probation and banned from film-making until it’s clear they are no longer a danger to the public. Starting out as merely heavy schmaltz, it resorts to increasingly manipulative tactics to wring out every drop of available emotion from the audience, like some merciless warden during exercise hour. There’s so much theatrical crying in the final stages that the inmates could have floated over the prison walls on the rising tide of their own tears.

In a story adapted from 2010 Korean film Harmony, Hui-Zhen (Ivy Chen) has to raise her infant daughter Yun-shi behind bars after murdering her abusive husband. Either this is movie jail or Taiwanese correction facilities are ridiculously plush, as her cell comes with soft-play fittings and supportive cellmates, including former stage diva Yu-ying (veteran singer Judy Ongg, who appeared in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book). Already under pressure from hardass warden Chief Fang (Miao Ke-li) to give up Yun-shi for adoption, Hui-Zhen’s hand is forced when the youngster develops a vision-threatening cataract she can’t afford to treat.

Eager to give her music-loving toddler a happy farewell, Hui-Zhen pressgangs her fellow lags into forming the titular choir. Ostensibly modelling his film on the showbiz-underdog model as displayed in The Full Monty, director Gavin Lin also leans in hard with several Pitch Perfect-style showstoppers. But the relentlessly peppy tone undermines anything that might have supplied foundational grit, like the laughably sanitised hazing received by teen arrival You-xin (Ho Man-xi) in the first half hour (she turns out to be an awesome dancer, though). Instead of integrating their personalities and pasts meaningfully into the choir plotline, Lin lets the inmates melodramatically solo out backstories in pointless flashback. If actual drama isn’t on the songsheet, his remedy is usually slapping in another cutaway of cute Yun-shi clapping this schlock.

Rather than bothering with a satisfactory crescendo for the choir, Lin prefers to relentlessly crank up the hankie quotient. Of course Yu-ying has cancer – and the girls, from the courtyard, console her grieving daughter over the outer perimeter with the power of song. Even that pales next to a staggeringly contrived reunion scene, a few years on, for Hui-zhen and Yun-shi, that in real life would have raised serious alarm bells over the Taiwanese prison authorities, adoption and court systems, and their duty of care. But that’s just how this film rolls.

• Sunshine Women’s Choir is in UK cinemas from 17 April