Plot
The story revolves around three brothers from a middle-income background in contemporary Singapore. These are characters who are representative of the business owners, white and blue collar workers of Singaporeans.
The oldest brother Yang Bao Hui (by Henry Thia) represents the lower income group. As a child, Hui left school at an early age to earn money to help support his poverty stricken family. He has been working as a delivery man in the same company for the last 30 years. At the persuasion of his youngest brother, he strikes out as an entrepreneur to sell health supplements. As business improves, Bao Hui quits his dead-end job and puts all his time into the business. Unfortunately the business is forced to a standstill when the health supplement is deemed unsafe for public consumption, which inadvertently brings Bao Hui close to financial ruin.
The second brother Yang Bao Qiang (by Jack Neo) portrays a well-heeled successful businessman. As the owner of his own business, he and his wife flaunts their wealth in typical Singaporean fashion, with designer clothes, a flashy car and a big house to put it all in. However in a moment of greed, Bao Qiang allows himself to be cheated out of his fortune and gets into a very difficult financial situation.
The youngest brother Yang Bao Huang (by Mark Lee) represents the ordinary middle working class. He earns a good salary working as a multi-level marketing regional supervisor for a health supplement trading company, and spends lavishly to maintain his ‘wannabe’ lifestyle. When the health supplement business goes bust, debts pile up and Bao Huang too, faces financial ruin. Even his wife gets involved, having their relationship soured and taking the blame for Bao Huang for a crime which she gets convicted for.
As the winds of fortune changes, the brothers begin to neglect their elderly mother. It was easy to be generous and filial during the good times but when household budgets tighten, what is the cost of true filial piety? Even the most basic arrangements, including whom their mother should stay with, become a contentious issue.
The families of each brother also try their luck at helping to earn an income to support. Unfortunately while out on the road with their getai lady boss rushing to another performance, a car accident occurred and Bao Qiang's wife and daughter were involved.
Bao Qiang's daughter turns out to be in critical condition unless she gets a blood transplant. The brothers' mother too, is in the same hospital. Coincidentally, the same type of blood was required to save both granddaughter and grandmother. The hospital so happened to have only one bag of the required blood, which a scuffle happens between everyone to decide who gets the treatment first.
Knowing the situation, the brother's mother overhears the commotion and sacrificed herself, to save her granddaughter, a younger generation whom she felt deserved to live more than herself as her time already drew near.
Much later, Bao Huang's wife is released, and the entire family is more well-off as they struck first place in a lottery draw. They give offerings to their mother, thinking that she helped them financially for all her life, whether deceased or living.
The film ends as the entire family enjoys their new start of life and the three brothers learnt of their lesson.
Read more about this topic: Money No Enough 2
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)