First of all, the movie was amazing, it will keep you on your toes the whole time you're watching, it will keep you on the edge of your seat. I also want to add, I watched it multiple times. I may be bias because I am a big fan of Zhang Yixing, but he delivered his character well. Spoiler alert: this movie is not for the faint of heart, the whole time I'm watching my heart was beating loud for every scene that arrives. It does not feel good to see the characters get hurt but that's how it shows how great of an actors and actresses they are. I felt their pain and I even cried during and after the movie. The movie intends to educate us about cyber fraud which really changed my perspective on people who get scammed. It is an eye opening, mind-boggling, extremely interesting movie.

Expecting nothing expecting more than a thriller/action movie, I was pleasantly surprised by "No More Bets". The movie takes its subject matter (scams around online gambling) seriously and describes rather precisely the mechanisms that undergird these operations. Narratively the film is original since it follows three different characters and does not really feature a protagonist or "hero". It focuses on victims - how they fall for scams, how they are led to addiction and eventual misery - but also the scammers and how they run their operation. Said scammers are actually depicted in a rather nuanced way (as the film goes on anyway), with kidnapped individuals who tend to become willing accomplices (or do they?), and willing accomplices who might not be entirely evil. The boss is an interesting character, who one second tries to rape one of his victims and the next is a smiling daddy who cheerfully introduces his daughter to that very same victim. Cold.

The film has its flaws though: its focus on victims sometimes veers toward graceless melodrama, although that can be compensated somewhat by other scenes. I'm thinking mostly of the alternate montage that shows the eventual demise of a victim and the scammers wildly celebrating the millions they just made. Ouch.

Finally, while the ending is unabashedly didactic, the pro-Chine police propaganda is as heavy handed as in Zhang Yimou's "Under the Light". The end result is that while most of the story sounds frighteningly real, the last part comes across mostly as fake.

Still, on the whole this is one of the most interesting commercial films to be released this year in China.

Were this not based on a true story, then I'd have thought you couldn't have made it up! A rather stroppy but brilliant programmer is passed over for promotion and so storms off in a huff. Like a great many clever men, "Pan Sheng" (Yixing Zhang) is a bit thick when it comes to the practical things in life and after a short plane journey finds himself attached to the lively and charismatic "Cai" (Sunny Sun) who is clearly too good to be true. A bus trip ensues and then "Pan" - and the other passengers - are promptly all but imprisoned working in a scam factory where betting odds are controlled and manipulated, where pretty girls are forced to host gaming tables and all essentially work to facilitate a complex fleecing operation that capitalises on the vulnerabilities of people at home who are successfully sucked into a fraud that nets the criminals millions of dollars and causes no end of collateral damage to those who find themselves addicted. "Pan" and former model, turned croupier, "Liang Anna" (Gina Chen Jin) try to concoct a way of escaping; of passing information to the outside summoning help - but their new guardians are savvy to just about every ploy they try. Interestingly, there is a glimmer of hope offered to all of them by their boss "Lu" (Chuan-jun Wang). He does allow them the prospect of buying their freedom - make enough money and off you go? Really? Hmmm. I did find the story fascinating - the use of some of the brightest minds to cleverly massage the data for an industry that is largely unregulated on a transnational basis is breathtaking. These guys basically print their own money as efficiently as if they had their own mint. Zhang does ok, even if he's a bit lightweight; it's Gina Jin who delivers the goods as an actor as the plot heads towards an admittedly rather unpredictable denoument. Sadly, there's far too much dialogue and the film drags it's feet all too often. A stronger, more effective, lead actor and half an hour less of preamble and waffle and Ao Shen could have given us a powerful indictment of human greed - on both sides of the computer screen. It's still watchable, though.