This probably isn’t that well known a film but I’d had it on my list for a while now and it is considered as being inspired by the original Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014. This isn’t exactly evident from the plot itself, which is incredibly convoluted, but can be in the motivations and ideals of the main antagonist.
An investment bank calls the police when a financial document is stolen from their servers and they receive a random demand to prevent it being leaked to the public. Though they are puzzled by the small amount of money being demanded, the police duly isolates all of the company’s staff with access to the document to an apartment while they investigate. These include IT technician Dylan and analyst Siu-Yu. Dylan despite his lowly job is actually the scion of a wealthy family and secretly has a crush on Siu-Yu. Another suspect is the disgruntled lead developer of the bank’s client responsible for creating a novel online platform. Meanwhile the hacker keeps sending strange instructions to the police, resulting in a sort of bizarre game that everyone involved goes along with in order to prevent the file from being leaked and inducing a market selldown.
Slick, fast-paced and packed with all of the latest buzzwords, this has all the makings of a cool high-tech thriller. Big data, Big Brother surveillance, self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, financial shenanigans, hacking, this film has it all. Between the many characters and multiple subplots, it’s a wonder that director Amos Why can keep it all straight and maintain audience interest. It does hold together, more or less, but this is a bad film all the same. The acting is sub-par, the gimmick of having characters break the fourth wall to talk directly to the camera as a way of expressing their inner thoughts is annoying, and most of all the plot does not make a lick of sense. Considering the low stakes involved, it is incompletely implausible that the police would even entertain playing silly games with the so-called “kidnapper” of the file. The director’s lame excuse for that the police detective in charge still holds a torch for his ex-wife who works at the investment bank.
The one possible saving grace is the implicit call to action against authoritarianism and the suggestion that youngsters can make use of modern technology to fight against the man, so to speak. Yet this is no way well thought out and it is telling that despite all of the hip buzzwords, in the end the game is played out using old-fashioned tricks in the real world and a boringly traditional con. The cleverest technique the kidnapper uses is stealing a mobile phone and guessing the password. That’s a good indicator of how hard the film tries to seem sophisticated but really isn’t. It’s even impossible to say that there is any tension here as the film takes a hint hint wink wink approach, all but pointing out who exactly is responsible right from the beginning. The saddest figure in all this is the hapless police detective who is played by everyone, especially his ex-wife. I wonder if that is an intentional mockery of the boomer generation on the part of the director.
As much as I wanted to like this, it’s just a bad film all around. It’s heart is in the right place and I appreciated the attempt to cock a snook in the face of Chinese authoritarianism. But the conception is flawed from the get go and it doesn’t even depict technology being used in an intelligent way.