No More Bets

I'm surprised by this movie. I heard from news that it is about scam jobs that are prevalent in Southeast Asia today. This movie depicted the situation realistically. I admire the movie attempt to also portray that the victims are on both side. I also like the moral lesson that the movie sent. Gambling is not just bad, it is destructive, and it consumes every one you love. I wish more people watch this movie, especially in Southeast Asia where thousands of people were conned to work in this scamming and online gambling center every month. I hope Southeast Asia authorities also serious in cracking down them.

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.

Were this not based on a true story, then I'd have thought you couldn't have made it up! A rather stroppy but brilliant programmer is passed over for promotion and so storms off in a huff. Like a great many clever men, "Pan Sheng" (Yixing Zhang) is a bit thick when it comes to the practical things in life and after a short plane journey finds himself attached to the lively and charismatic "Cai" (Sunny Sun) who is clearly too good to be true. A bus trip ensues and then "Pan" - and the other passengers - are promptly all but imprisoned working in a scam factory where betting odds are controlled and manipulated, where pretty girls are forced to host gaming tables and all essentially work to facilitate a complex fleecing operation that capitalises on the vulnerabilities of people at home who are successfully sucked into a fraud that nets the criminals millions of dollars and causes no end of collateral damage to those who find themselves addicted. "Pan" and former model, turned croupier, "Liang Anna" (Gina Chen Jin) try to concoct a way of escaping; of passing information to the outside summoning help - but their new guardians are savvy to just about every ploy they try. Interestingly, there is a glimmer of hope offered to all of them by their boss "Lu" (Chuan-jun Wang). He does allow them the prospect of buying their freedom - make enough money and off you go? Really? Hmmm. I did find the story fascinating - the use of some of the brightest minds to cleverly massage the data for an industry that is largely unregulated on a transnational basis is breathtaking. These guys basically print their own money as efficiently as if they had their own mint. Zhang does ok, even if he's a bit lightweight; it's Gina Jin who delivers the goods as an actor as the plot heads towards an admittedly rather unpredictable denoument. Sadly, there's far too much dialogue and the film drags it's feet all too often. A stronger, more effective, lead actor and half an hour less of preamble and waffle and Ao Shen could have given us a powerful indictment of human greed - on both sides of the computer screen. It's still watchable, though.

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.