Animal World Review

Already filmed as Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler, Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s manga series Ultimate Survivor Kaiji is given both barrels by rising Chinese filmmaker Han Yan. Animal World is a crazy mash up of eye-popping action flick, tense gambling story and sentimental family sob story all told through hyper-kinetic visuals. It’s overstuffed, disjointed and suffers from storytelling longueurs but there is so much filmmaking invention and spurts of nutty energy it adds up to a thoroughly enjoyable romp and could put Han on Hollywood’s one-to-direct-a-dumb-ass-action-flick shortlist.

Traumatised following the death of his father, Zheng Kaisi (Li) is a dispirited amusement arcade worker who can’t pay his comatose mother’s medical bills and believes his financial dire straits means he can’t provide for would-be girlfriend (Zhou Dongyu). Looking for easy money, he buys into a get-rich-quick scheme proposed by childhood pal Li Jun (Cao Bingkun) which means staking the deeds to his family home. When it transpires Li Jun is in debt to a shady organization fronted by Anderson (Douglas who gives good puppet master for his 12 minutes of screen time), Kaisi is offered a way out in a card game version of Rock, Paper, Scissors taking place on board a cruise ship called Destiny. Losing means becoming a lab rat in unspeakable medical experiments.

After the leisurely-bordering-on-unengaging build up of Kaisi’s predicament, the film really kicks in as he has to negotiate the high stakes game, figuring out the allegiances of the other players and the strategies to win. Rock, Paper, Scissors hardly sounds like poker at Casino Royale but this convoluted version is surprisingly gripping. It is casually thrown away that Kaisi’s late father was a math teacher and he comes into his own figuring out all the permutations of cards like a manic Rachel Riley, Han depicting his calculations visually via Guy Ritchie-Sherlock Holmes stylings.

For, stylistically, Han’s approach is a thieving magpie aesthetic borrowing from manga, videogames and practically every US action flick of the past 20 years (he has a particular yen for Edgar Wright crash zooms and madcap montage). Following a traumatic childhood, Kaisi goes on flights of fantasy, be it a heart-stopping car chase or a hallucination where he imagines himself as a vigilante clown, boasting the menace of IT’s Pennywise and the brio of Deadpool, taking down monsters on a graffiti ridden train. Han is a terrific shooter. If he finds more controlled consistent writing, he could be a force to be reckoned with.