The 2017 Chinese film version of Keigo Higashino's bestselling thriller - the one in which a crime-busting physicist and his childhood friend, a maths professor whom we know did it, face off in a Furuhata Ninzaburo...alright, Columbo...style game of cat-and-mouse, is more The Devotion of Suspect Zzzzz, a movie zapped of the book's energy due to the absence of character backstories and Japanese context and further dampened by the exaggerated performances of the two leads: a repugnant Yukawa (here "Tang Chuan"), whose smugness is laid on as thick as his concealer, and a narcotised Ishigami (here "Shi Hong"), whose maths brilliance has been replaced with chronic fatigue.
★★☆☆☆
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