07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Fox Hunt Review: Tony Leung's financial fraudster takes on Chinese police in Europe
Fox Hunt (NC16)
106 minutes, opens on May 8
★★★☆☆
The story: Financial fraudster Dai Yichen (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) has swindled the life savings of many across China, yet lives the high life in Europe, having cultivated powerful friends who shield him from justice. To nab the wily Dai, China sends the Fox Hunt Team, its cross-border commercial crimes specialists. Detective Ye Jun (Duan Yihong) leads the group as they comb France, with the help of French law enforcement officials. Their mission: to apprehend Dai and recover assets that will ease the suffering of the working-class folk taken in by his schemes. The screenplay is based on a true crime story.
As with most Chinese police thrillers, the patriotic messaging is everywhere here, in ways that are both subtle and unsubtle. A Chinese flag fills the screen towards the end of the story, for example, telling viewers that the Chinese police will always protect the people.
Mind you, pro-police and pro-military propaganda is baked into nearly every Hollywood thriller involving cops, Navy Seals and jet fighters, so this more overt method could be said to be less deceptive – it is the equivalent of a YouTube full disclosure stating that the video is sponsored.
It also suffers from the usual trope seen in films from China, which tend to depict the police as one-dimensional paragons of virtue. On the other hand, it avoids an even worse screenwriting sin, which is to make the criminals so thuggish and brutal, they seem almost bestial.
Aside from that, the rest of Fox Hunt is fairly decent, with a good balance of international financial intrigue and action. The plot also keeps the action grounded in reality, with neither the villain nor the good guys possessing convenient hacking skills.
Dai and Ye are depicted as sworn enemies, each being familiar with the other and bearing a mutual grudge. They are, of course, opposites in character. Ye is down-to-earth and selfless, while the fraudster is a sophisticate with a penchant for throwing luxurious garden parties at his French mansion.
Director Leo Zhang (Bleeding Steel, 2017) is fully aware that one cannot make a movie about a high-living swindler without spending on locations, wardrobe and expensive vehicles, which this movie showcases admirably as the action moves from the fine apartments in Paris to the millionaire ghettos in the south of the country.
The story delves into the mechanics of cross-border cooperation as it follows the Chinese cops doing their jobs under the watchful eye of their hosts, the French police. That detail is a nice touch and handled well, delivering the right amount of information that explains the delicate politics of such investigations.
Leung is in fine, smirky form as the urbane criminal embedded within French high society, a class of people who serves to validate and protect him. Fox Hunt makes it clear that they are to be despised, a message that it reinforces with the way that it celebrates the cops, both Chinese and French, who devote themselves to their duties.
Class, not ethnicity, unites people across the East and West, a fact underpinned by the juxtaposition of scenes that contrast Dai's easy living with the people whose lives were destroyed by his actions.
While Dai is far from antiheroic – he is without argument a scumbag in an expensive suit – Leung's understated manner makes him watchable onscreen, far more so than if he had been portrayed by a less restrained actor.
Hot take: Despite its overt nationalism, Fox Hunt delivers a decent balance of cross-border intrigue and action.
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