A Gilded Game (PG)

Starring  Andy Lau, Ou Hao, Huang Yi, Kent Cheng, Ni Ni

Directed by Herman Yau

We've seen this movie before. Many times.

Wall Street, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Boiler Room, Hong Kong's version of Wall Street aka Andy Lau's The Goldfinger, etc.

About corporate greed, share market manipulation and utterly unscrupulous but nattily dressed people from Crazy Rich Asian Criminals.

In Wall Street, it's “Greed is good”. Here, it's “Money never regrets” spit out in evil English. By the way, in carnivorous Trump times, ang mohs are portrayed just as corruptibly despicable as mainland fiends.

A Gilded Game piles it on as a simplistic eye-popping gold standard of an ultra white-collar crime drama. Sleazy beautiful people, tech billionaires, swanky big office, cutthroat politics, casual cougar-boss sex. To bedazzle, stun and warn Chinese audiences as a glitzy cautionary tale about the wanton excesses of greed and duplicity. Which to us here, fed by capitalist Hollywood and HK flicks, is nothing really new.

But this deal is still entertaining in the way an Andy Lau-fronted pic often sails through so neatly and tidily. And interesting in giving us a PRC spin to  crass overkill. To land a coveted contract involving dog food here, one has to kowtow humiliatingly to actually eat that dog food.

Dandy Andy stars as a calm, dandified, morally decent grey-haired genius, Todd Zhang, who wears a bow tie, has a big ego and a favourite toilet cubicle from which he dispenses stock tips to a fawning loo attendant while peeing.

“I'm a world-class equity analyst,” he tells his unwanted intern-puppy, Gao Han (The Eight Hundred’s Ou Hao), a top finance graduate needing a big break in the no-prisoners fight pit of an IPO investment bank. It's run by a ruthless uber-female CEO, Helen Li (spot-on ice queen Huang Yi from Overheard 2 and 3), and her lapdog henchman, Mike (HK's go-to hangdog sidekick Kent Cheng), who barks there-will-be-blood quips like “Win or out!” in English.

Basically, these folks advise companies on the evaluation of their IPOs before listing on the stock exchange.

Zhang is an expert assessor insisting on due diligence and utmost integrity as the Last Honest Man in China who doesn't want little-people shareholders to lose their money if a company tanks. He's so dogged he takes a helicopter apart piece by piece to check whether the chopper is exactly what its owner claims it to be. The man's a maverick who confronts his own colleagues in a board meeting about their shameful behaviour. “This is about justice in the financial world,” he declares.

The uncaring, dirty-tricks plotter Li, meanwhile, only wants to push an IPO deal through. By inserting an insidious trapdoor clause to gobble up the companies that sign on. She works in secret cahoots with competing firms to collapse the share price to trigger a legal takeover.

The mega-bucks here, a hi-tech hydrogen storage business, is suckered up to heart-attack level. Gao, the young hotshot, is torn between his mentor Zhang, big boss Li promising vast riches, and the family owning the targeted company who are close friends. It's all very cliched. But this good cast and oh, the odious lifestyles of the rich and infamous really nudge it along.

Okay, the frantic buy-sell-buy share manipulation in the final segment is quite confusing. But hey, there are also affluent dudes standing on a high-rise edge philosophising about guilt and suicide, so who's quibbling about this Confucian-confusion money-mind trip?

Now, since this is a mainland pic, the bottom-rung folks — including the toilet man — are portrayed as innocent victims of the games wealthy bastards play. Complete with punishments meted out right at the end like a FBI rogues gallery.

It's a ham-fisted PRC-movie requirement about society's undesirables which suits HK director/co-writer Herman Yau (Shock Wave, Customs Frontline), himself an unsubtle, un-lazy hammer, just fine.

He scores when he swirls the drama around Lau, who seems to float above the glitter-litter, Ou and Huang as his three main dancers. The scenes where Andy Lau, actual MVP, endures humiliation from fictional VIPs — dumping his too-honest evaluations into the dustbin — are a real hoot.

Director Yau loses traction when he tries to inject an element of mystery into Lau who keeps going to an enigmatic songstress in a nightclub (played by Lost In The Stars’Ni Ni) he shares a past with. It's a manufactured ang moh-style sultry smoke without any significant fire, and a damn anomaly here.

Not an oddity as incongruous as an ethically righteous valuer in A Gilded Game.

But still strange enough. (3.5/5 stars)

Photo: Shaw Organisation