Rating: C
Dir: Guo Dongxu
Star: Fan Jiaqi, Wei Wei, He Xiyao, Zhu Qihui
a.k.a. AI Kung Fu Girl
I must confess, it was the alternate title which grabbed my attention, even if it’s considerably less accurate than the original one. So: well played, Moxi Movies. Well played. I guess there is technically an AI Kung Fu Girl present. She’s one of the villain’s minions, standing just to his right in the pic above. But she’s certainly not the central character, or anything like it. That would be Cui Xiangfeng (Fan – I’m largely guessing there, since there’s no IMDb or other information online, and no English credits. That is the actor who is listed first on the Moxi Movies YouTube page. It’s all I got), an employee of the Kehua Group.
They are engaged in… well, again, the details are a bit vague, due to subtitles that aren’t quite top-notch. According to these, “Kehua Group has already developed a chip that can substitute human brain. If this chip is implanted into the human brain, the implantee could execute a designated sequence according to a preexisting program. The distinguish precision rate could go up to 99%.” I trust that’s an adequate explanation, because again, it’s all I got. This seems perhaps to enhance human talents, while also making the recipient more pliable. You think that might be the sort of thing the ChiComs would wholeheartedly embrace, but here it’s depicted as not a good thing.
Indeed, Xiangfeng becomes increasingly concerned about the effects of the implants – in particular wholesale memory loss – and starts investigating his own company. This does not sit well with his boss, Director Ran, and company chairman, Mr. Ding. This is where we discover the film’s main wrinkle. Turns out that Xiangfeng actually underwent the procedure himself, and was kept around by Kehua so they could watch him. But, with the aid of various clues and other individuals, he gradually peels back the artificial reality constructed for him, to get to his real memories. It feels a bit like something Philip K. Dick might have come up with – then discarded as kinda dull. It plays somewhat like a very low-key combination of two Paul Verhoeven movies, Total Recall and Robocop. Albeit made by Temu.
The problem is, it doesn’t go hard enough at the potentially disorienting nature of the premise. As a result, while Fan makes for an interesting and sympathetic hero, this never rises above the level of a competent TV movie. As Evil Corporations go, Kehua are a bit crap, too. Seriously, Xiangfeng is able to defeat about fifteen of their minions at once. AI Kung Fu Girl is the only half-decent one, and I’d like to have seen more of her. It ends in a way that suggests the ChiCom committee had a say, with the authorities – notable by their absence to this point – suddenly showing up to bust Kehua, and deliver a moral about raising your kids right, or something. I’ll start work on a knockoff improvement of the script in the morning.