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I walked into a screening of Jack Neo's "Ah Girls Go Army Again" fully expecting to hate it. Instead, that's not quite how it turned out.

Usually, I'm the guy who enjoys almost every movie I watch -- and I watch a lot of movies. Campy horror, incomprehensible arthouse, a sappy romance, war dramas, you name it, I like it. I even liked Marvel's "The Eternals", an opinion which has made me the subject of considerable mockery around the office. I just like watching movies, it's much better than real life.

But I was not looking forward to AGGA 2.

Anticipating cringe

Confession, I haven't seen AGGA 1. But I have read the reviews, which were almost universally terrible.

A colleague of mine was forced to tasked with watching and reviewing the first movie, and I gathered a number of complaints from her experience.

• Overwhelming number of product placement scenes.
• Cringeworthy humour based on stereotypes.
• Annoying theme song.
• Not much in the way of a plot.

Having decided to go into AGGA 2 blind, similar to how a guy scared of water conquers his fears by plunging into the deep end of the pool, I was ready to endure all that and more.

After all, AGGA 2 only has about an hour and a half of screentime. I could stick it out.

Started off as expected...

Right off the bat, all my worst fears seemed to be confirmed.

The movie begins by resolving a cliffhanger from the first movie. And it does so rather quickly.

I had no idea how dramatic they made this dilemma in AGGA 1, but it seemed that more time could have been spent on exploring the consequences. Instead, it seemed as though Jack Neo and his fellow scriptwriter Link Sng wanted to get to the meat of the movie, namely the platoon's experience of serving in the army.

Then came the jokes.

I'm not a huge fan of Singlish being used as a punchline, that sort of thing died out in the 2000s with the likes of Phua Chu Kang. Neither am I much amused by stereotypical "gangster" characters acting uncouth for laughs.

That, coupled with some blatantly obvious product placement scenes, made me realise why the first AGGA was panned by the critics. It seemed like more of the same this time round.

But just as I was beginning to resign myself to disappointment, something interesting happened. The movie got better.

But it became surprisingly good

Two characters emerged as the leads of our tale and stayed there. But what surprised me was that Princess See, played by Yang Guang Ke Le and Joey Tay, played by Belle Chua, had an actual plot to follow. Sure, it wasn't Scorsese, but neither was it a bunch of random scenes filmed one after the other. I confess to having low expectations, but AGGA 2 was rising above them.

Ke Le and Chua are actually pretty good actors when they were actually given something to do. Ke Le has natural comic timing and charm, while Chua did well in a couple of emotional scenes that didn't feel trite or went too over the top.

It also helped that the product placement disappeared after a while, leaving the actors free to concentrate on the plot, which they did with aplomb.

The movie then chugs along with scenes of basic training during National Service. As an SCDF man myself, I was interested in the depictions of casualty rescues (which I was familiar with) and camping in jungles (which I was not).

Though these scenes were competently done, with little to no stereotypical humour involved, I cynically assumed that the product placement hadn't stopped at all. Instead, what was being "sold" was the Army itself.

Much like how the first Top Gun movie attracted scores of moviegoers to enlist with the U.S. Navy, I thought Neo was just aiming to do the same thing but on a smaller scale, showing how the Army equips its recruits with useful skills.

But I was proven wrong again. These "training scenes", which wouldn't have looked out of place in an actual training video, ended up being plot-relevant later on. I was also pleasantly surprised by the performance of local blogger Mr Brown as an officer supervising the recruits' Basic Military Test.

He was cast as the same character in Ah Boys To Men 2, which interestingly enough, sets up a paradox. If this Mr Brown character is the same guy from ABTM 2, then it follows that both franchises are part of the same Jack Neo Cinematic Universe (JNCU).

But mystifyingly, one of the characters in AGGA 2 references ABTM 2 as if she watched it in the cinema. So, what is the real relation of the Ah Boys to the Ah Girls? We need a multiverse movie to sort things out.

After a climactic fight scene, the movie ends on a happy note, instead of the cliffhanger of AGGA 1. The Ah Girls were girls no longer. They had become Ah Women.

Things I really liked

1. The production values. Everything was polished and you could tell the producers didn't skimp on the technical budget.
2. The film's music did not include the earworm of a theme song from AGGA 1, but rather appropriate songs.
3. The cameo appearance of who I'm pretty sure was Andruew Tang, better known as "The Statement" from local wrestling promotion Singapore Pro Wrestling, as an instructor tutoring the recruits in the ways of martial arts.
4. Quite possibly the best joke related to Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen ever put to film.

Things that could have been done better

Of the many ways the film could have been better, my main gripe is that we didn't see more of the other actors.

Ke Le and Chua are the clear stars, and Kelly Kimberly Cheong's Amanda Ong had a couple of dramatic moments. But aside from them, and arguably Xixi Lim's Yuan Yuan Yuan, the rest of the platoon barely had any screen time.

Perhaps they had more of a presence in AGGA 1, but it would have been nice to see more interaction among the platoon mates.

The film also mainly focused on the Chinese actors, and I would have liked to see more from the Indian and Malay members of the platoon. Still, I appreciated the depiction of a woman as a platoon officer, and a Malay man as apparently the highest-ranking officer we see in the Army.

And my dream of a serious film depicting an alternate universe Singapore that genuinely has to conscript women into the military due to low population growth, and exploring the social and tactical ramifications of such a move, will just have to wait.

Keep going

What did I learn? A film franchise derided by critics can actually get better. A director and his writing team may have taken feedback into account and tweaked their sequel to reduce the number of pain points highlighted in the first movie.

Most of all, our local actors can really act, as long as you give them something to sink their teeth into.

Neo has previously spoken of the difficulties in getting film funding. Perhaps the product placement scenes are the price one has to pay to see local talent rise to the occasion.

There's supposedly a third movie in the works, and if the franchise continues on its positive trajectory, I'm looking forward to the next one.

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Top image from mm2entertainment.