Gu zhu yi zhi

No more Bets is a great well written thiller with great twists and surprises and a great cast and a very different type of performance from Lay from EXo fame The movie was very tence and make great use of its budget and locations and the movie highlights real life issues and gives use viewers a real insight of China and Cambodia .

The movie is a box office success and it's very well deserved and I expect many more thillers in the future to capture this type of tone and atmosphere within the movie as it was great 2 hour movie and it really has a interesting payoff for all characters invloed for the movie.

Based on the Southeast Asia fraud factory incidents in 2021, No More Bets is a solid tense Chinese crime thriller that presents the world of online scams in an eye-opening fashion, delivering unnerving suspense and shock with hard-hitting truth.

Through a promising overseas job offer, computer programmer Pan Sheng and model Anna Liang are lured into a fraud factory, trapped permanently in a slave labor camp where they are forced to commit cyber fraud in an online gambling scam. As the criminal network expands, Pan and Anna conspire to contact the police...

Director Shen Ao balances the multiple storylines well and maintains tight pacing, taking the audience through the logistical pipeline of a scam from beginning to end. The narrative kaleidoscopically presents the phone scam from different perspectives, ranging from the crime boss running the fraud factory, the computer programmer coding the scam app, the model fronting the gambling matches to the unfortunate victim taking the bait.

What draws the audience to No More Bets is knowing that this all happened in reality. It was shocking to think about how as technology develops, crime networks naturally become sophisticated and better organized too. The film incorporates the factual to its advantage, finding a style between documentary and fiction, like a dramatic film that's completely composed of the re-enactment scenes out of a true crime documentary.

There's been an exploding trend of crime films from Mainland China, with the immediate emergence of subgenres this year, like pulp crime with Lost in the Stars, crime procedurals like Dust to Dust, and neo-noir with Zhang Yimou's Under the Light. Government regulations seem to have opened up, allowing the depiction of gangsters and crime as long as public service announcements are tagged before the credits, specifically, title cards detailing every perpetrator's prison sentence and a public message discouraging committing said crime.

Come to think of it, Hollywood had a similar phrase with the Hayes Act from 1930 to the 1960s with its set of do's and don'ts in cinema. I hope this is a step towards more possibilities for Chinese cinema, opening up more fresh stories in new genres being told.

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.

The film's content is well-suited to the current times. Although not overly detailed, viewers can easily envision the structure of such organizations. Moreover, the film highlights some of the deceptive tactics employed by these gambling establishments.

This film serves as a stark warning, particularly given the prevalence of gambling advertisements on illegal websites, which may desensitize viewers to the severity of the issue.

While the first part effectively introduces the main characters and builds towards a compelling climax, the latter part feels rushed, and the relationships between characters lack sufficient depth.

This movie was both educational and entertaining to me. Everyone thinks they can avoid getting scammed but what they underestimate is how thorough and well-planned some fraudulent schemes can be, how they're adept at manipulating your feelings and getting you to spend more of your money to reach that high of winning. The first part of the movie had good momentum and it felt like the stakes were high, but after that the pacing of the story slowed down for more plot development before quickly wrapping up. Overall I thought the movie was good because it was able to hold my attention, and it had a satisfactory ending too.