It 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, having been passed over for promotion, flies off to work for a new gaming company offering big bucks. But instead he finds himself passport-less and strong-armed into grinding for a fraud farm in a rural primary school run by gangmaster Bingkun (Chuan-jun Wang, doing a good approximation of the stooping slimeballs you used to get in old Shaw Brothers films). Among their sucker-baiting operations are catfishing, investing and casino gambling, with croupier and former model Anna (Gina Chen Jin) coerced into operating the honeypot.
Shen goes lightly non-linear in the vein of infrastructural films such as Traffic, arranging the story in segments devoted to individual characters, and for good measure fires the whole exposé up with heady energy. Hopping between countries and between the real and the virtual often gives the film scope to get inventive; there is one eye-catching sequence in which gambling addict Tian (Talu Wang), caught in the thrill of the wager, contemplates his cards, and we see bursts of the musical score and instruments that accompany his fluttering emotions.
But there are limits to the infatuation Shen can display for this grafters’ paradise. The Tian plotline ends in weepy moralising, and having to make Pan and Anna’s escape plan chime with the official perspective, rather for their own story’s sake, drains No More Bets of momentum as it crawls over the two-hour mark. Like the press-ganged troupe of nerds and beauties, there is plenty of talent here with nowhere to go.
• No More Bets is released on 8 September in UK cinemas.
