Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Li Feng Yi, Cao Bingkun, Michael Douglas
Intro:
...for sheer oddness this film deserves a look...
Bored with the run-of-the-mill tentpoles populating the local megaplex? Go see the new Chinese actioner, Animal World. Not because it’s good, but because it’s such a singular beast. Superhero fatigue is a real thing, but there’s not a single documented case of hallucinogenic-clown-vigilante-monster-fighter-oh-wait-it’s-actually-about-rock-paper-scissors-fatigue on record. How could there be? That’s a genre of one (even though it’s kind of a remake).
Our hero, Zheng Kaisi (Li Feng Yi), is a loser. Working a dead end job and struggling to pay for his comatose mother’s medical bills, in times of stress he imagines he’s a sword-wielding superhero clown battling garish demons in a hyper-stylised urban dystopia. You could be forgiven for thinking that this nugget of weirdness would be Animal World‘s main focus, but no – the whole clown thing is just kind of there, one more oddity in a sea of strange. Kaisi goes in with his childhood friend Li Jun (Cao Bingkun) on a dodgy real estate deal, and when old mate blows the money on a gambling spree, he finds himself owing big to a shadowy American crime lord (Michael Douglas, picking up a cheque but still giving it a shot) who offers him a chance to square his debt: all he has to do is get on a ship (called Destiny, because subtlety is for losers), which is departing for international waters, on which a dangerous contest will be taking place…
You’re expecting some kind of underground gladiatorial scenario where jaded plutocrats bet money on the desperate debtor of their choice, and that is almost what you get, but instead of facing off in the Octagon, Kaisi and his fellow unfortunates are forced to play rock-paper-scissors for their lives.
Not even joking.
Animal World is such a strange concoction that you spend a fair bit of time expecting that the film will lurch off in another bizarre direction, but no – this is the main plot. Kaisi and old buddy Li Jun, who has also been pressganged, team up with a third chump to try and win the day – it turns out Kaisi’s father was a math teacher and our man has a knack for running the numbers, working out the best strategy for all three of them to win. Director Yan Han dramatises the film’s frequent discourses on math and game theory in the style of A Beautiful Mind by way of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies, employing swirling cameras, crash zooms, CGI diagrams and more to spice up the, for want of a better word, action. It works, too: Yan Han is a madly inventive filmmaker, and his brand of flashy visual style carries the day.
Up to a point, at least – Animal World is easily half an hour too long and it’s hard to get over the fact that, holy crap, this is a movie about rock-paper-scissors and we’re kind of expected to take it seriously. Still, for sheer oddness this film deserves a look – and you can expect Yan Han to be helming a Luc Besson-produced action thriller or similar sooner rather than later.
