Review | Project Gutenberg film review: Aaron Kwok, Chow Yun-fat face off in twisty crime thriller
Felix Chong directs a convoluted story about a counterfeit-money gang that morphs from crime procedural to unhinged action thriller. Chow’s role is his best in years
3/5 stars
From his screenplays for such popular crime thrillers as the Infernal Affairs and Overheard trilogies, it is clear that Felix Chong Man-keung is obsessed with the sophisticated planning and execution of crimes. And it is hard not to admire the thought that the veteran Hong Kong writer-director has put into Project Gutenberg.
Only the second film Chong alone has directed (after the low-budget parody Once a Gangster in 2010), this twisty crime drama offers a fascinating look at the operations of a US dollar counterfeiting syndicate. Its lead actors, Aaron Kwok Fu-shing and Chow Yun-fat, are given ample room to impress.
Chong’s attempt to play with the audience’s expectations results in a film of two incoherent halves: while the first shows the meticulous workings of a mysterious group of counterfeiters, the second turns into a deliberately unhinged action thriller, coloured by betrayals and twisted love, and interwoven with one ludicrously plotted twist after another.
Kwok plays Lee Man, apparently one of only two surviving members of an international counterfeiting ring. Once he has been extradited from a prison in Thailand to Hong Kong to help police there track down the group’s mastermind, Painter (Chow Yun-fat), Lee recalls how, as a painter himself, he failed to break into the Vancouver art scene in the 1990s.
From there, Project Gutenberg plunges into the convoluted backstory that Lee, an unreliable narrator, recalls under questioning. According to Lee, he was recruited by Painter to help make the perfect money-printing plate because of his photographic memory and astonishing drawing skills.