No More Bets review – Chinese Wolf of Wall Street aims to teach moral lesson

With its expose of digital scammers, fraud farms and gangmasters, Ao Shen's thriller is inventive and snappily directed. A shame, then, that it morphs into a public health warning

It is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot - because Ao Shen's thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entree to the industry of online deception. Compared with the unrepentant and far more effective dramatic irony of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film this one often resembles, we get unnecessary scenes of government officials reading the riot act to digital scammers, and a patriotic after-credits montage of fraud and trafficking victims saying how much safer they feel back on Chinese soil.

An unnamed south-east Asian country is the promised land for cheesed-off programmer Pan (Yixing Zhang), who, having been passed over for promotion, flies off to work for a new gaming company offering big bucks. But instead he finds himself passport-less and strong-armed into grinding for a fraud farm in a rural primary school run by gangmaster Bingkun (Chuan-jun Wang, doing a good approximation of the stooping slimeballs you used to get in old Shaw Brothers films). Among their sucker-baiting operations are catfishing, investing and casino gambling, with croupier and former model Anna (Gina Chen Jin) coerced into operating the honeypot.