No More Bets

A young programmer, Pan Sheng, leaves his job after being passed over for a promotion and takes what looks like a well-paid position in Singapore. On the flight he meets the people he believes will be his new colleagues, but the arrangement turns out to be a setup: the recruits lose their passports, are moved to another country and are forced to work for an underground online gambling operation. There he meets Liang Anna, a model working as a dealer who wants out of the scheme as much as he does. The film follows their involvement in a large-scale internet fraud and the figures behind it, with the story moving between the swindlers, the people they recruit and the investigators closing in.

Shen Ao directed and co-wrote the crime drama, his first feature as director, ahead of Dead to Rights and Escape from the Outland. Zhang Yixing plays Pan Sheng, with Jin Chen as Liang Anna and Wang Chuanjun, Yong Mei, Zhou Ye and Darren Wang in supporting roles. Released in China in August 2023, it runs 130 minutes and was produced by several Chinese companies, among them China Film Group Corporation and Tao Piao Piao.

Its commercial performance was considerable: a worldwide box office of about 571 million US dollars, far beyond what its scale would suggest. Audiences rate it 6.8 out of 10 on IMDb, based on roughly 3,800 votes, and 7 out of 10 on TMDB, from a smaller sample, while a film critics' rating of 5.3 out of 10 from five reviews places professional assessments below those viewer scores.