SINGAPORE — Tay Ping Hui makes his directorial debut with Meeting The Giant, a coming-of-age story about a team of Chinese basketball players who are flown to Singapore to reinvigorate the sport. Even though the name of this movie suggests that there is one central character, we really end up meeting about five giants and many more average-sized characters.

The focus of the story seems to shift throughout the movie — never mind the fact that the dubbing sounds strange and unnatural. The film opens in China, as a tall, Yao Ming-esque teenager Chen Hang (Delvin Goh) bids farewell to his village and makes his way to a secondary school in Singapore. Once in Singapore, Chen Hang incurs the wrath of his basketball teammates — including team captain Wu Junhui (Chua Seng Jin) – who are unhappy with “the foreigner” for stealing their thunder on the basketball court. As it turns out, the movie is not actually about Chen’s problems with his schoolmates. The audience is suddenly told that Chen has been selected to join other talented players from China to form an elite youth basketball team that is sponsored by a wealthy businessman (producer Zhu Hou Ren) and managed by Wu’s father. As Wu Junhui watches the new Chinese youth team, which comprises He Xiaodi (Ian Fang), He Dadi (Lim Shengyu), Wang Shaohua (Michael Lee) and Gao Ming (Ng Hanbin), play against other teams, he realises how naive he has been about his own ability to play basketball, and how unfair he has been to Chen. We then go on to see how each individual team member struggles to survive in Singapore, and how they react to pressure and anti-foreigner sentiments from the people around them.

Are you lost yet?

Granted, Tay Ping Hui has a pretty steady hand for a first-time director. And his actors — most of whom are real basketball players — are quite natural despite their inexperience. But all of that is marred by the fact that the movie’s screenplay, which is written by DJ Danny Yeo, seems to be driven by its message rather than its characters. It attempts to tell, in a fairly clumsy manner, the cultural differences and lack of understanding between locals and foreigners in Singapore. In one scene, for example, Wu Junhui and his father bring glutinous rice dumplings to the homesick boys during the traditional Duanwu Festival. Junhui is confused by his father’s gesture and asks for an explanation. His father tells him that the boys probably love dumplings because of the Chinese poet Qu Yuan — whose death the festival commemorates — and Junhui goes on to confuse “Qu Yuan” with “Qi Yuan”, which means seven dollars in Mandarin. Terribly subtle, we know.

What is therefore clear is that Meeting The Giant is a thinly veiled social commentary on Singapore’s struggle to come to terms with the influx of foreigners, told from both the foreigners’ and locals’ points of view. What is unclear is why Tay chose to tell the story from so many perspectives. True, you could argue that it is natural to have so many characters because it is, after all, a story about a basketball team. But without an obvious main character with whom the audience can sympathise, the story lacks focus, and becomes trite and superficial.

Let us assume Chen Hang was to be the main character — for he is the only person that remains in the movie from the beginning to the end. Instead of littering the film with increasingly repetitive flashback scenes of each team member saying goodbye to their family members in different parts of China, we could perhaps spend more time learning about Chen’s relationship with his “study mother”, who appears in only one or two scenes.

Instead of watching Ian Fang, who plays a pesky teenager, fight for the remote with fiery-tempered members of his team, we could learn more about the team’s dynamics from Chen’s perspective. And instead of watching Wang Shaohua’s blossoming romance with the movie’s token pretty girl (Zhuyan Manzi), which lasts only several scenes, we could be learning more about Chen Hang’s struggle to make friends in Singapore.

So is Chen Hang ultimately the Giant we are meant to meet? We could be simplistic and say that he probably is. Or we could get a little more philosophical and say China is the giant Singapore has to learn to come to terms with. Or, perhaps, to these young players, Singapore is the cruel, heavy-handed giant that ultimately crushes their dreams.

Either way, it doesn’t matter, because the meeting didn’t go too well, anyway.