Song Luân
Tâm
Overview
Abandoned as children, three friends with disabilities find fame on TV — leading them on an adventure to find the mother who left one of them behind.
Cast
Reviews
5 min readThe Uncomfortable Laughter of Face Off 3: Imperfect Trio
I’ll admit it: I went into Face Off 3: Imperfect Trio expecting a train wreck. A 4.5 on TMDB (from just two votes, no less) doesn’t exactly scream "must-watch." But what I found was something far more unsettling than a bad movie—it’s a film that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and in that confusion, it stumbles into something almost fascinating.
Almost.
The premise is simple, even noble: three friends with disabilities, abandoned as children, find fame on television and set off on an adventure to find the mother who left one of them behind. On paper, it’s a story about resilience, found family, and the search for belonging. In execution?
It’s a tonal mess, swinging wildly between slapstick comedy and maudlin sentimentality, often in the same scene. The film’s heart is in the right place, but its hands keep fumbling the delivery.
Director Lý Hải has built a career on blending comedy with social commentary, but here, the balance feels off. The humor in Imperfect Trio leans heavily on physical gags—pratfalls, exaggerated reactions, the kind of comedy that feels like it belongs in a silent film. There’s a scene where one of the characters, who uses a wheelchair, gets into a literal tug-of-war with a street vendor over a bag of fruit.
It’s played for laughs, but the joke lands with a thud because it’s not clear what we’re supposed to be laughing at. The absurdity of the situation? The character’s determination?
Or, uncomfortably, the fact that he’s in a wheelchair at all? The film never gives us a clue.
That ambiguity is the problem at the core of Imperfect Trio. It wants to be a comedy about disability without ever really engaging with what that means. The characters’ disabilities are treated as quirks, not as lived experiences that shape their worldview.
There’s no sense of how they navigate a world that wasn’t built for them, no exploration of the frustrations or small triumphs that come with that. Instead, their disabilities are just part of the joke, like a prop in a vaudeville act. It’s not cruel, exactly, but it’s not kind, either.
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsOne drift on Bao Loc pass ate the budget.
Ly Hai's crew talked about a pickup truck on the Bao Loc mountain road, a 360-degree slide, then a hit into concrete pillars built for the shot. A production member told Vietnamese magazines that one chase shoved the whole picture to 17 billion dong. He had starred in the first two Face Off pictures, in 2015 and 2016. latestnetflix.com's view is that this time he wrote and directed and stayed off camera.He said he would not cheap out because he wanted each film to look unlike the last.,,
Lat Mat: Ba Chang Khuyet opened in Vietnamese cinemas in April 2018, in the same window as Avengers: Infinity War. Two weeks in, the distributor was already claiming 60 billion dong. By 19 June, after nearly two months still on screens, the house number was more than 85 billion, about 1.3 million tickets. Kenh14 put the tally at 85.5 billion, enough to knock Thang Nam Ruc Ro out of the all-time Vietnamese top five. Five times the spend. The biggest grosser Ly Hai had paid for himself. Vietnamese papers called a two-month theatrical run rare for a local film.,,
The product was three disabilities and a Thai reporter.
Song Luan plays Tam, who is deaf. Huy Khanh plays Duc, who is blind. Kieu Minh Tuan plays Loc, paralyzed in both legs. They grow up in a charity home after being left as children, sell grilled bananas from a truck, then trip into TV fame and a hunt for the mother who walked away from one of them. The new trailer opened on Duc remembering Ma Tu's house, with a line the press printed. "I don't know when I entered this charity home or who brought me here." Thai actress Nene, billed on Netflix as Pornnappan Pornpenpipat, rides along as the reporter on her first Vietnamese feature. Producer Minh Ha, Ly Hai's wife, told the press that maybe 30 percent of Vietnamese films break even or turn a profit, so the only way to fight Hollywood was to spend like this was a real movie.,,
TMDB still lists revenue at $3,332,974. The English title is Face Off 3: Imperfect Trio. Netflix put the film on the US service on 28 August 2023, five years after that crash on the pass. The official trailer, posted by Ly Hai Production in March 2018, is still the sales tape.,,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
Related movies
More titles in the same genres and with the same cast.
Face Off 6: The Ticket of Destiny
2023 Movie
Furies
2022 Movie
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2018 Movie
Swapped
2026 Movie
Gladiator
2000 Movie
Baththa
2026 Movie
KPop Demon Hunters
2025 Movie
How to Train Your Dragon
2025 Movie
Jurassic World Rebirth
2025 Movie
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
2022 Movie
GOAT
2026 Movie
White Chicks
2004 Movie