That the two biggest hits at the Chinese box office in summer 2023 both had a strong anti-gambling message perhaps hints at a contemporary anxiety, though No More Bets (孤注一掷, gūzhùyīzhì) is clearly the more direct of the two even if it also shares with Lost in the Stars its echoing of a theme in contemporary mainstream cinema that Chinese citizens are safe nowhere other than China. Then again, that particular message maybe somewhat disingenuous seeing as the villains here are all themselves Chinese if operating abroad to try and evade the law.
This ambitious programmer Pan (Lay Zhang) learns to his cost when he abruptly quits his job after being passed over for a promotion in favour of someone with an influential father and accepts a too good to be true offer from what he’s been led to believe is a gaming company in Singapore. Soon enough, however, he realises their brief stopover is actually their destination and he’s been trafficked to another South East Asian nation where he is forced to participate in online gambling scams. Pan is however a righteous young man and immediately takes a stand, explicitly telling his captors he won’t do their bidding though they viciously beat him. Eventually he teams up with the slightly less conflicted model Anna (Gina Jin Chen) who vaguely understood the job when she agreed to it but not that they’d confiscate her passport and she’d be unable to leave.
Like Pan, Anna accepted the job while frustrated by the vagaries of her industry after being unfairly let go by her agency after her photo was used on a flyer advertising sex work without her (or their) consent. Like those who play the games, she was suckered in by the promise of easy money that could be earned quickly and didn’t really think about the implications of what she was doing. That the film positions the victim, Tian (Darren Wang), as an incredibly wealthy young man who had access to vast generational wealth avoids the implication that some are drawn into scams for the same reasons that Pan and Anna were in they feel a sense of impossibility in their lives because of societal unfairness and economic hopeless but nevertheless paints his gradual descent into madness and addiction as a personal failing born of his insatiable greed rather than a misfortune that might befall anyone with a smartphone. Even so, if a highly educated young man can be tricked by such an obvious scam it suggests that it really can happen to anyone.
At least, the film seems to say that in any case it’s bad to gamble but you should definitely think twice about promises that sound too good to be true, especially if they involve offers of work abroad. A series of talking heads interviews (with blurred faces) from victims of trafficking at the film’s conclusion all advise viewers not to travel to other countries to work, while several remark on how relieved they felt to see Chinese police when they were eventually rescued. Uniformed police also give a press conference during the film insisting that they are doubling down on combatting fraud and other kinds of cybercrimes while Inspector Zhao (Yong Mei), whose speech bookends the film, struggles to get anything done because the crimes are taking place overseas and therefore outside of her jurisdiction. Then again, the entire operation is run by Chinese businessmen who try to engender a sense of loyalty and rebellion among the men whom they’ve essentially enslaved by making them think that they’re merely rebelling against an unfair society by taking the money of the “greedy” people who play their games and redistributing it to their own, downtrodden families.
Pan is trying to do the right thing, but often does it in the wrong way actively putting others in danger while trying to find a way to blow the whistle on the whole operation in the hope of being rescued while even Inspector Zhao at times seems dismissive, failing to take the claims of Tian’s girlfriend that he’s being swindled out of his entire family fortune by online scammers seriously until it’s too late. Even so, Shen crafts an often tense tale of escape as Pan does his best to send out coded messages under the noses of his kidnappers while unwillingly participating in the fraud hoping that eventually someone will figure out what’s going on and put a stop the cruel cycle of misery once and for all.
No More Bets opens in UK cinemas 8th September courtesy of CineAsia.
UK trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 