Review | Cyber Heist movie review: Aaron Kwok plays computer hacker in action thriller with a laughably shallow understanding of how the internet works

A fairly watchable, action-driven crime thriller, Cyber Heist is badly let down by its antiquated depiction of how the internet functions

Kwok plays a hacker and police informant determined not to go back to jail but who finds he’s being set up to be the scapegoat for a digital bank heist

Reading Time:2 minutes

Lam Ka-tung (left) and Aaron Kwok in a still from Cyber Heist (category IIB; Cantonese), directed by Wong Hing-fan. Simon Yam co-stars.

Published: 6:15pm, 7 Mar 2023

2/5 stars

Cyber Heist is a fairly watchable, action-driven Hong Kong crime thriller that is rendered laughable by its ill-advised central conceit of visualising the internet using the most cringingly antiquated imagery imaginable.

Reuniting the producer (Soi Cheang Pou-soi), director (Wong Hing-fan) and star (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing) of poverty melodrama I’m Livin’ It for a very different endeavour, the film follows Kwok’s computer expert as he dives into the digital world to thwart some murderous thugs’ “money-laundering” master plans.

Kwok plays Cheuk, a computer hacker and former convict who works for a cybersecurity company headed by Chan (Lam Ka-tung). With a wife (Megan Lai Ya-yan) and a young daughter struggling with a heart problem at home, the reformed Cheuk is determined not to go to prison ever again.

Bad news: soon after he uses a special firewall he has secretly developed to interrupt an audacious digital bank heist that temporarily shuts down Hong Kong’s banking system, Cheuk realises that his boss is in fact the one who stages the virus attack in the first place.

The reluctant hero is then forced simultaneously to fend off Chan’s efforts to make him the next scapegoat for the bad guys’ financial crimes, while covertly collecting incriminating evidence for inspector Suen (Simon Yam Tat-wah) of the police force’s Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau.