Scare Out

The Chinese are usually quite good at these quickly-paced, high-tech, espionage thrillers but this one is really a bit of a mess. After a fairly sophisticated surveillance and pursuit operation captures “Nathan” (Nathaniel Boyd) but sees investigator “Yan Di” (Jackson Yee) take a crossbow arrow to his shoulder, they head back to their office to discover that the bosses think there is a mole in their operation. A new boss is drafted in and she (Jai Song) and their overall director are convinced that the spy is either the now bandaged up “Yan Di” or his long-time colleague “Huang Ki” (Yilong Zhu). What’s more, they know that they are the suspects. Meantime, “Yan Di” is having some marital difficulties with his pregnant wife. She thinks he is having an affair and we know that he is having clandestine meetings with “Bai Fan” (Mi Yang) but not for sex. What’s going on, then? Well that’s really the problem here. After about half an hour I wondered if this was a sequel and I’d missed a first film that established the characters, their jobs and the modus operandi of the criminals whom, I guess, were after state secrets. It doesn’t hang about, but without really establishing much by way of characterisation or plot, it falls back all too often onto the whizzy visual effects that, as a Brit, make me totally convinced that we ought never to allow the Chinese state to build a mega embassy anywhere near Britain, much less a couple of hundred yards from the heart of our trillion quid financial services sector. The levels of surveillance, data manipulation, clothes tagging and just general monitoring is staggering and though I appreciate this purports to be a work of fiction it ought also be a fairly clear warning of the capabilities of a government that has laws for just about everything. To be fair, though, it also reminded my just how much cleaner their public toilets are. I didn’t not enjoy it, and the denouement did hint at a “Scare Out II” in due course, but this needed to focus way more on a cohesive plot and characters and much less on lots of tagged on-screen green boxes and drone footage of shopping malls. Disappointing, sorry.