On the 1st of February, when most Singaporeans were returning to their jobs, Jack Neo with his fellow MediaCrop artistes, Fann Wong and Gurmit Singh, were preparing for the first day of production for “Just Follow Law” a satirical movie about Singapore office politics. The Moviexclusive team was one of the few privileged invited to witness the traditional ceremony before the start of a film production in Singapore.

The premise of this new movie “Just Follow Law” takes place in a frictional government sector WAS (Work Assistance Singapore) when an freak accident happen between a blue collar worker Ah Shui (Gurmit Singh) and his supervisor Tanya (Fann Wong), resulting in a soul swap between them.

The soul transference scenario had been presented before in a number of movies such as “Freaky Fridays” and “Vice Versa” but those movies mainly involved either family members or couples with romantic interests. As Jack Neo stressed after researching, this is the very first time that it is a soul swap between an employer and employee.

Gurmit Singh also added that there is no romantic angle between his character and Fann Wong’s character in this movie as the objective of the soul transference in this movie is to explore the different mindsets of the upper management and their subordinates. It also identifies and focuses on the lack of understanding from the upper management and the “switched off” attitude of the subordinates.

For Jack Neo, the idea for this movie was inspired by Prime Minster Lee’s speech at the recent National Day regarding the lack of professionalism in Singaporean workers. One of the examples that Jack Neo noticed during his stint in the government sector was that most government workers finishes work on the dot at 5pm and their mentality of staying after that would be like performing as a favor. With this movie, he hopes to highlight the bureaucracy inefficiencies in office and perhaps besides gathering laughter, viewers could also reflect on their shortcomings too.

And in order to deliver the point, there won’t be exaggerated performance when Gurmit and Fann’s characters swap soul. Instead, both artistes studied each other mannerism carefully and will be applying it subtly into their performances such that viewers will be able to tell them apart easily yet not turned off by any over the top performance.

The title of Jack Neo’s latest movie “Just Follow Law” was a deliberate choice as it blends well with the Singlish expression “Just Follow Loh” and yet it still makes sense in proper English. It also marks the change in the usual Jack Neo’s trademark of making movies that are filled with dialects to this movie that will contain 60% English. Something that Fann Wong was glad about, as she was worried that she would be required to speak in Hokkien. The English that will be used in this movie will be simple and easy to understand by most Singaporeans.

“Just Follow Law” is budgeted at 1.05 million dollars and is scheduled to hit the screens in May. Golden Village Pictures will be distributing it locally and Moviexclusive will be presenting any news as soon as we receive it.