Welcome back to Dark Corners Streaming.
Available on Netflix, Animal World is a Chinese film which I went into completely blind
and stuck with because of a very arresting opening,
introducing us to Zheng Kai-si who has underdog hero written all over him,
from his dead end job to his long-suffering girlfriend.
His father is dead, mother in a coma, he’s terminally short of money
and may have some mental health issues
as he keeps imagining himself as a superhero clown,
while imagining everyone else as monsters
whom he slays in some spectacular fight scenes.
But in the end, he's just Zheng Kai-si.
Ripped off by a friend, Zheng finds himself inadvertently in debt to Michael Douglas,
'This is my wife's favorite song.'
who gives him the chance to pay the money back with a trip on the good ship Destiny.
'You'll play a game and if you are lucky, your loan will be cleared.'
In this floating casino Kai-si, along with his fellow losers, play only one game.
'It contains 12 cards with the images Rock, Paper or Scissors.'
You start with 3 lives and 12 cards, win a game you gain a life, lose a game you lose a life,
at the end of four hours you must have at least 3 lives and no cards.
Run out of lives; you are eliminated.
Beyond that, there are not many rules,
'And you do, what you need to do.'
you can swap, cheat, make alliances, screw people over, whatever.
'Welcome to Animal World, let the games begin.'
The number of each type of card remaining in play is displayed so you can play the odds,
which is maths beyond me, but not beyond Kai-si.
Good news for him, perhaps not so brilliant for us.
However entertainingly animated it is, there really is a limit to how much statistics you want in what is sold as a science fiction movie.
Also, and I don’t think this is a spoiler because I think you’re better off knowing going in;
I did think the maths and game theory would be act 1,
not the whole film.
To be fair, this is as much about the morality as it is the statistics
and the film does it’s absolute best to keep things visually interesting.
But it’s still hard to avoid the feeling of one of those kid’s shows that tries to make maths cool.
And it doesn’t help that, while it’s not a super-long film it is over two hours,
and while it was quite tense initially, the situation does not evolve enough to sustain that,
despite the high stakes.
'As a result of elimination will be more miserable than you can possibly imagine.'
And that eye-catching opening seems a very long time ago,
and possibly from a different film.
All of which is a shame, because it is a cool idea,
based incidentally on the manga by Nobuyuki Fukumoto,
with good characters and lots of flash.
But it comes up hard against the problem that; it would be difficult to follow if we didn’t know Kai-si’s plan,
and his plan requires a lot of explaining.
Thanks for watching. Have you seen Animal World?
What films manage to make gambling scenes tense? Let us know in the comments below.