Brief Story Line
Zheng Kaisi (Li Yifeng - Sword of Legends TV series, Mr. Six etc) was a young man who could not seem to get a break. Since eight years old, he started to develop some kind of hyperactive imagination where he believed himself to be a character of a killer clown in cartoon show. His mother was in a coma and treated in hospital where she was taken care by Kaisi's long time love interest nurse Liu Qing (Zhou Dongyu - Under the Hawthorn Tree, Better Days etc).
With mountains of debts, Kaisi had no choice but to join in a deadly game hosted on a ship, coordinated by the mysterious Anderson (Michael Douglas - Ant-man and the Wasp, Fatal Attraction etc). Kaisi later met with other people who were forced to join in the game too, including his old friend Li Jun (Cao Bingkun).
So what would happen to Kaisi as he tried his best to leave the ship alive and be cleared of his debts? Find them all in this exciting movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Well that was quite unexpected. From the brief synopsis and also the trailer, this movie seemed like a full action film with some over the top action sequence. I remembered the film actually played in Indonesian theaters in 2018 but somehow did not get to see it then. Anyway, it turned out to be completely different but in a nice way. The focus of the movie was actually the game on the ship itself. It was something that required intelligence, coordination and deduction which made me quite excited by how Kaisi had to win it.
The game itself was actually pretty simple and if played using a simple strategy would be easy enough to beat. But the suspenseful part was there was no rules against cheating, which meant that everybody could use that strategy if they wanted to survive. It was pretty intense and resulting to various surprises and twists that happened during the course of the game.
When I watched the earlier part, I noticed some pretty amazingly done scenes using some decent special effects. There were one or two cool action scenes which were pretty entertaining, albeit not really necessary to my personal opinion. I mean even without those scenes, the movie was already exciting enough. But it's also possible they were done because the director/writer Han Yan followed closely with the manga. Yes, this movie was indeed adapted from the manga Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji written and illustrated by Nobuyuki Fukumoto which explained the strong manga feel while I was watching this. Perhaps I should read them or search for the animated and live version movies to compare them.
Li Yifeng played his part as Kaisi nicely enough while the rest of the cast who I thought were quite memorable were other players he met like Zhang Jingkun (Su Ke) and Meng Xiaopang (Wang Ge). Sadly to me the famous Zhou Dongyu did not have enough screen time to leave a good impression. Michael Douglas was pretty standard in his role. Btw, there was a mid end credit scene which gave me a total surprise as it hinted for a possible sequel. And from the internet I found that there would indeed be a sequel supposedly released in 2021.
Overall this was a movie that was entertaining and require some logical thinking for deduction with some intensity of winning/losing a game, supported by few interesting characters and some nicely done action sequence (which I thought were just to attract audience). It has a strong manga feel and should be enjoyable by audience who love those attributes. I personally felt 2 hrs 10 minutes was quite long considering it could have been shorten a bit if they took out the unnecessary scenes. Nevertheless I still enjoyed this movie a lot and would love to see the sequel.
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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