Brief Story Line
Liu Li-min (Joseph Chang - Love Contractually, Village of no Return etc) was working in an online news media called True Standpoint where he need to get more subscribers to keep his show. When a convicted former softball rising star Zhang Zheng-yi (Edward Chen - Your Name Engraved Herein, Mermaid Sauna TV series etc) somehow escaped from jail, Li-min was caught in the middle and tried to make the most of it to gain popularity for his show.
While trying to re-investigate the crime involving Zheng-yi, Li-min found that there were so many things than met the eye and it might also endanger the life of his young daughter Zhen Zhen (Caitlin Fang - American Girl etc).
So how would the story conclude? You can find out in this film.
End of Brief Story Line
As a fan of mystery movie where I could be surprised by the turns and twists plus enjoying the moment of trying to investigate/guess in my mind of the real culprit, obviously I liked watching this film. It has all the ingredients of an entertaining murder mystery movie with the shocking and brutal murder, the surprising suspect and a protagonist who was very human. This type of movie was different from whodunit where you got a pool of suspects being investigated by a genius/very intelligent investigator and all the facts were revealed in one go as a conclusion.
The movie started off with introduction of the characters involved and did not take long to get to the interesting part. Subsequently the movie moved in a steady pace, not fast, but not very slow either. And as the story progressed, we were shown bits and pieces of what happened from the eyes of Liu Li-min and also Zhang Zheng-yi. I think both of them were portrayed convincingly by Joseph Zhang and Edward Chen. Meanwhile the young Caitlin Fang was quite a joy to see, as her character was a real breath of fresh air to an otherwise rather gloomy movie. I think she was nominated for awards due to her performance here and also in her other movie, so her future looks great.
Aside from those three, there were other cast as well, with two of them shown in the movie's poster, i.e. Aviis Zhong (The Wonder Woman TV series, Dead & Beautiful etc) as Li-min's wife and reporter Ya-jing and Amber An (Moonlight Romance TV series etc) as Zheng-yi's sister Zheng-fang. In addition, there were support characters like Zheng-yi's girlfriend Shi-yun (Tzu Shuan Chan), police detective Deputy Lai (Deven Ho) and few others who were important to the story development.
The mystery itself was quite intriguing, and like in other similar type of movies, there would be things to side track us and deviate us from the truth. This time, I did not manage to guess the real culprit which was one of the plus thing for me. And I also like the way they tried to show how truth can be so easily manipulated these days in a subtle way. I think the writer Yeh Nai-Ching and director If Chen were pretty good in making the film entertaining especially with so many twists and turns. The movie itself has a duration of around 2 hours. It was categorized for 16+ due to violence and other attributes. Oh and you really should not miss out on a very important mid end credit scene.
Overall I personally feel that this movie was quite excellent in term of story telling with the way the mystery unfolding little by little and the engaging characters. The twists were one of the best traits for me in here aside from the cast. Although there was one piece of mystery involving a minor character in the middle that was not really resolved (unless of course if it really did not have anything to do with the murder). It would be quite a shame if the movie did not garner the attention I think it deserved. So if you are fans of such kind of murder mystery film, you could give this a try as it is easily accessible in Netflix.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
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