ANIMAL WORLD

released out NOW! 12a | 129 minutes Director Han yan Cast li yifeng, Michael douglas, Zhou dongyu, Cao Bingkun

A kid trying to pay off a humongous debt by taking part in an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors doesn’t, on the face of it, look like an obvious starting point for a Hunger Games-style franchise. But with its “To Be Continued” ending, it’s clear Animal World director Han Yan has high hopes for this Chinese-made, manga-derived, fantasy-flavoured gambling drama.

Li Yifeng plays Zheng Kaisi, a teen in a dead-end job who, after being scammed by his oldest friend, ends up owing an astronomical debt to a sinister organisation headed by the mysterious Anderson (an effortlessly scene-stealing Michael Douglas). To pay off the bill, Zheng is forced to take part in a high-stakes card game, one with terrible consequences for the losers.

Yan adds plenty of fizz to make the story more cinematic (there are Sherlock-style puzzle-solving graphics and hyperkinetic hallucinations), but all this visual bling can’t disguise the fact that you’re watching what’s essentially a two-hour card game with a long list of instructions.

At one point Anderson tells the game’s participants that cheating is allowed and that eventually they’ll revert to their most basic animal instincts. But the players, and the movie, remain frustratingly wellbehaved. Like Kaisi, this is a movie that sticks tediously to the rules. Steve O’Brien