The Flower has exploited The Boy’s and my enthusiasm for Asian pictures, and also expanded her circle of friends, requiring more and more trips to exotic locales. And when the Korean theater is booked up with…American superhero movies…we can sometimes escape to Alhambra which is like Chinatown, in the sense that Chinese people live there, and not like Chinatown, which is more a movie location these days.

In A or B, a businessman wakes up, trapped in his home (or is he?) and forced, Saw-like, to choose between two unpalatable options: Reveal your affair or let your business partner be sent to jail; uncover your money laundering or have your best friend be murdered. Stuff like that. Obviously, a sinister force is at work here, and our hero is the object of his vengeful fantasies.

I’ve spoken about the nature of Korean revenge flicks, and how they are steeped in a highly moralistic viewpoint that revenge is really wrong and will never work out for you. You know, unlike cathartic American revenge pictures, where the audience is expected to identify with the vigilante, Koreans revenge pictures tend to be told from the standpoint of the victim of the revenge plot. They can be very, very good—but they are in no ways fun. “We are all sinners, and forgiveness is our only hope,” basically.

It’s too soon to opine on Chinese revenge pictures, but this one has that sort of message without the Korean heaviness. Our protagonist is definitely flawed. I mean, flawed doesn’t do it justice: He’s basically a bad guy, much like the protagonist Seven Years of Night, though he commits his crimes for sheer ambition and greed. (This is a big Chinese theme, as we saw in Till the End of the World, and is its own kind of political correctness, of course.)

Unlike the Korean movies, though, the Chinese message of redemption (at least here) is ultimately light-hearted: no matter how bad things get, there’s gonna be a redemption. The story gets increasingly preposterous as the protagonist, having earned his shot at redemption by realizing the error of his ways, struggles to stay alive—and perhaps avoid punishment.

But there’s a strong moral force at work here, too: You know if the hero lives, he’s going to have to suffer somehow for all the harm he’s done. I’m okay with that.

The reviews on this were pretty negative but we went anyway, and we found ourselves really enjoying it, especially as it went from revenge picture to more action/thriller. We were also impressed that we could follow the plot (both of us could!) even though there were a lot of threads. I particularly liked how the protagonist went from unlikable to really unlikable, and then slowly back to more likable as he takes his journey toward redemption.

The Asians have not let us down yet…but nothing lasts forever, right?