With its exposé of digital scammers, fraud farms and gangmasters, Ao Shen’s thriller is inventive and snappily directed.
A shame, then, that it morphs into a public health warningIt is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot – because Ao Shen’s thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entrée to the industry of online deception.
Compared with the unrepentant and far more effective dramatic irony of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film this one often resembles, we get unnecessary scenes of government officials reading the riot act to digital scammers, and a patriotic after-credits montage of fraud and trafficking victims saying how much safer they feel back on Chinese soil.An unnamed south-east Asian country is the promised land for cheesed-off programmer Pan (Yixing Zhang), who,…
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