A World without Thieves | Review

Its harder to fight boredom than crime.

The kind of wolves that populate this part of mainland China are not the ones who walk on all fours, while they work in groups they come in all shapes, ages, sexes and sizes. Extortion and theft are the name of the game that is – until karma and morality factor into it. Designed as a “knowing when to quit the game” at precisely the right moment, Feng Xiaogang’s comedy about a peasant falling into several hands of cunning thieves is loaded with plot twists that remind of the three coconuts and the keep an-eye-on-the-ping-pong-ball diversion. While most of the action elements concentrate on whose carrying the money, in addition this is about whose carrying the future and a lifetime’s worth of burden.

While this starts off with all the promise of a road trip movie filled with vast landscapes and a criminal life – it quickly turns into a farcical tale with dim-witted characters just a couple of I.Q points higher than the clan of spirited Kung Fu Hustle personalities. There are more recognizable Chinese cinema attributes to this film than the star power in Andy Lau – there is some fancy CGI that gets plopped about and some martial arts theatrics which make this habitual and usual to the international releases from Hong Kong in the past couple of years.

Filled with breath-taking outdoor location shots and tarnished by uninspired sets, the little distraction from this moral tale full of nauseam and its accompanying non inventive guessing game comes with the interesting duels that make handshakes look like lethal, live-threatening acts of violence. Unfortunately for material art fanatics, the turf of a train is less of a physical battleground and more of a psychological one.

There are some nice stylistic flourishes but the monotony and time-length drain is a disservice to the story based on a novel by Zhao Benfu. A World without Thieves tries in vain to be likeable and inoffensive but with all the Buddhism in the foreground this quickly becomes a mainstream comedy which is simply not that enjoyable.

Montreal World Film Festival 2005.

Rating 1 stars