New comedy-drama Every Dog Has Its Day is straightforward comfort viewing for Chinese moviegoers: funny characters, a bit of comedy, a bit of drama, and the odd moment of overwrought melodrama for good measure. It comes with a grumpy old man, a precocious child, and a protagonist in between who lives a dodgy, semi-criminal life, but who has a heart of gold in the end. It will not challenge anyone, but it does broadly entertain. By next month it is likely to be almost entirely forgotten, but at least no one will remember it for bad reasons. It was reportedly a crowd-pleasing hit at last year’s Golden Rooster Festival, but is only reaching general release now. Its director Yang Yue makes a transition here from producing, and does a reasonable job for his debut.

Lin (Li Youbin) is a 70-year-old retiree experiencing the early stages of Parkinson’s. Needing day-to-day care, he winds up paired with Ma Teng (Lin Gengxin), a divorced thirtysomething loser who only stumbled into a job interview by mistake.

While Ma Teng does begin to take on the job, it only appears to be so that he can slowly defraud Lin of his savings. At the same time Lin’s health is more troubled than he lets on, and his grumpy demeanour is masking suicidal ideation. The bulk of the resulting film sees them slowly move towards fixing each other’s problems in generally predictable and rather uplifting ways. Li and Lin are both appealing actors who at least make their characters enjoyable to watch. Other members of the cast are not so lucky. Wang Yanlin is stuck largely playing a stock unsympathetic son to Lin, while Victoria Song is saddled with an archetypal stiffly disapproving ex-wife for Ma Teng. Halin Chen capably does the adorable daughter routine, but there’s nothing to the character that hasn’t been seen many, many times before.

The film is also a laboured 124 minutes when its storyline begs to be a tighter 90 to 100 instead. When it finally does end, it is remarkably abrupt – as if someone in the production simply decided to carve off the final 10 minutes. It is arguably a better work for losing that extended conclusion, but it is still a surprise not to see it there. The third act that is there is well played and genuinely well written, with some particularly nice scenery that is captured well by cinematographer Lee Ping Bin.

There is some inventiveness within an extended fantasy sequence halfway through the movie, and a surprising pop soundtrack that includes Iceland’s Of Monsters and Men alongside local groups. It is a generally quite pleasant film, making it a little too difficult to properly discard the piece, but it does ultimately lack in ambition or originality. With China generating upwards of 500 hundred feature films every year, it takes a lot to make it to cinemas overseas. It is slightly surprising to see that this one did.