Since watching Crazy Rich Asians two weeks ago, I’ve been trying to understand why the Hollywood-backed, first “all-Asian cast” blockbuster for two decades is considered by many to be quite so groundbreaking.

The film, an adaptation of the first in a trilogy of novels by Kevin Kwan, has been hugely successful in the US, where “Asian” effectively means east Asian or ethnically Chinese. It’s now the highest-earning romantic comedy since The Proposal in 2009.

The more I spoke to fans of the film, the more sure I became that, as a diaspora, we east Asians are not asking for enough from a movie that makes so much of the ethnicity of its actors for its content.

The film has raised high expectations for its “representation” – and rightly so. Hollywood is essentially attempting to atone for – or distract from – the decades of whitewashing and invisibility of Asian people in film – by giving them all the parts at once.

Joy Luck Club was the last Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian cast, yet little progress has been made for east Asian visibility in movies since it came out 25 years ago, and without integration of Asian actors across cinema, representation will never amount to more than mere presentation.

Which is why we should expect a game-changer given this new opportunity today. Crazy Rich Asians, however, is safe and generic, lacking in grit and filled with cheesy one-liners, Mean Girls cattiness and a glossy version of east Asian culture. While Michelle Yeoh is convincing playing the ultimate tiger mother, the wholesome veneer on the portrayal of the “model minority” only faintly cracks when intergenerational tensions build up, and even then, the film offers a watered-down rendition of the real-life flare-ups in Chinese households.

The original book was better at depicting the nuances of east Asian culture: it opens with a mother refusing to let her kids take a cab in the rain because their destination is only a “five-minute walk”. The fact that they’re rich enough to have just bought a hotel but won’t be wasteful is something that resonated with me immediately.

While discussion of Crazy Rich Asians has focused largely on the representation of women, the film also makes a conscious effort to dispel the stereotype of the emasculated Asian male. But this is done so overtly that some scenes are little more than product placements for the washboard-abs of the leading male actors, including Nick Young, the film’s protagonist – played by the half-Malaysian, half-English former model Henry Golding. While Golding is unlikely to represent all “Asian men”, the bigger concern lies in the message it sends young Asian males, reinforcing the idea that the western standard of male beauty is the most attractive.

The staunch defence of the film also speaks volumes about the kind of self-undermining that east Asians are all too good at, and which has landed us labels such as “the silent minority”. We would rather praise Hollywood for giving us a corner of its stage than demand stronger and more complex representation.

“You can’t expect too much progress,” I’ve been told repeatedly in the last fortnight. “We’ve got to start somewhere; Hollywood isn’t ready for full-on Asian.” One Singaporean woman described the film as Hollywood’s litmus test – as if the familiar faces and cultures seen all over the world needed the mass approval of a safe romcom before being played out on a big screen again with any more nuance.

Crazy Rich Asians was an opportunity, but not just for Hollywood to pat itself on the back, cash in and tick all the desired “diversity” boxes by lumping everyone into the same project. It could have given us representation that went beyond the skin-deep – something that many of us are still too scared to ask for.

I’d rather see one strong Asian character in a non-majority Asian cast any day than something that claims to change perceptions just by making up the numbers. Let’s hope that the cast of the film land significant roles elsewhere soon. In fact, I demand to see it.

• Yuan Ren is a former editor at Time Out Beijing, and has written extensively on China for several publications