Posted in: Film Festival, Movies | Tagged: film review, nyaff 2018, the big call

NYAFF 2018: 'The Big Call' – Attack of the Phone Scammers [Review]

You could say The Big Call is a rather typical crime genre entry for The New York Asian Film Festival. It's a thriller by Hong Kong genre director Oxide Pang, now plying his trade on blockbusters for the Chinese market.

The movie is like a big expensive Public Service Announcement about the evils of phone scammers, which are now as big a problem for people in China and Asia as they are for the US.

Earnest rookie cop Ding, played with wide-eyed stoicism by Chen Xuedong, sees his former high school teacher commit suicide after getting ruined by phone scammers and makes it his mission to hunt down the ringleader of the biggest phone scamming operation of them all, Lin Ahai. Lin runs his social engineering empire from a building in Thailand, which the Chinese these days regard as a lawless netherland the way Americans think of Mexico. Ding is invited to join the special task force for hunting down phone scammers and finds his ex-girlfriend from the police academy has already infiltrated Lin's ring in Thailand. Xu poses as a tough street girl in desperate need of money who forms a bond with Lin's girlfriend Liu Lifeng, a tough-as-nails moll who runs Lin's operation.

If you assume that all Chinese blockbusters are propaganda, you'll find plenty of grist for the mill here. The bad guys are hilariously over-the-top in their nefariousness, wearing designer clothes and hanging out in expensive penthouses with seemingly limited armed guards that need a whole SWAT unit to take down when the time comes. It's almost a Spectre level of secret society villainy.

You also get a breakdown of the various ways phone scammers glean people's phone numbers and information from stolen data gleaned from various websites and social media accounts so they can phone people up and tailor the call to their particular situations, whether it's telling a college student she's entitled to extra funds if she pays a fee, conning a housewife or pensioner into investing in bogus get-rich-quick portfolios, or even manipulating a millionaire into believing his mistress has been kidnapped and he has to pay the ransom within an hour. It's all hysteria and paranoia cranked to 11, these phone scammers and their near-omniscient ability to read people for social engineering, even as the informational parts of the movie are apparently real and meant to be warnings to the public.

Of course it takes a Hong Kong director to make everything this overwrought and hysterical in the slickest way possible. Of course there's going to be a climactic chase and shootout with a massive bodycount, and during a big parade, no less. When shooting a crime epic in a foreign country, you always have to have the climactic shootout at a big parade with lots of extras running away in panic. This being a Mainland Chinese Crime Movie with a Message, of course the bad guys are going to get their comeuppance, the forces of Law and Order assert their authority to restore order.

The subtle subversive element here is that the bad guys are much more fun and interesting to watch than the earnest good guys. Chang Xiao Chuan plays Lin as more than a sneering villain but a man struggling to get ahead and has to consciously decide just how bad he's willing to be in the name of greed. There's actually a much more interesting movie threatening to burst out from under all that bombast, and that's the subplot about Liu and her bond with undercover cop Xu.

Taiwanese actress Gui Lunmei plays the ruthlessly pragmatic gangster with cracks in her armour, playing a cat-and-mouse game with the worker she suspects is an undercover cop as she warms to her in spite of herself. There are deep layers of loneliness, longing and melancholy in Gui's portrayal of Liu, trying to tell herself she's in control as she suspects even her boyfriend Lin of lying to her and planning to ditch her. If there's anyone this movie really belongs to, it's Gui Lunmei. She effortlessly takes it over every time she's on screen and walks away with the whole thing.

Say what you will about this movie, but it's never dull.

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