Movie Review - God of Gamblers III: Return to Shanghai

One must not mix up God of Gamblers III: Return to Shanghai with God of Gamblers 3: The Early Years. By a quirk of title translation – and because the God of Gamblers movies ended up doing a kind of extended universe thing – the numbering and titling for the English language versions make almost no sense.

Return to Shanghai continues the adventures of the Saint of Gamblers (Steven Chow), now fully trained by the God of Gamblers, and his rivalry with the villains from the previous films.

Said villains have put together a team of supernaturally gifted gambling types in order to finally put paid to the pesky Saint and, because coherent world-building is a suckers game, the combined magical gambling powers involved in their fight sends the lot of them back to Shanghai in 1937. where he falls in with gangster Ding Lik.

The Saint teams up with his grandfather (played by Man-Tat Ng here doubling as both 1980s uncle and 1930s grandfather). Together they have to fight the occupying Japanese, beat the Saint’s nemesis, and help out crime lord Ding Lik with a poker game against the French God of Gamblers. All this while trying to work out how to get back to the future.

There is also a mistaken identity b-plot involving Ding’s girlfriend and her twin sister whose mental age is five, and some cops from the future who keep calling back in time on the Saint’s cellphone-telephone.

So far so simple...

Set Piece Cinema

The plot, such as it is, is total nonsense, and whether this movie works for you will depend entirely on how funny you find Steven Chow. I find him kinda funny and so the film kinda worked.

Where the first two films were gambling action-comedies about gambling, this one is more of a comedy-action movie with some gambling. The comedic set-pieces are funniest when they are based around the kind of action slap-stick that Jackie Chan perfected. The muppet-style torture and mistaken identity are less impress.

The subplot with the twin sister is borderline offensive and somewhat creepy. And the rest of the plot is a trainwreck of tangled plot threads punctuated, as with the previous films, by somewhat shocking moments of real brutality.

The gambling scenes, the highlight of the previous two films, and so integral to the plot and world, are asides here and easily the weakest part of the film. They are cheesy and clunky and feel far less inspired than the action scenes. The last sequence in particular plods along with only one real joke and a deus ex machina that made less than no sense, even by the standards of a film like this.

In Short

This is not a great film. It might be worth a watch just for the scene where police officers co-ordinate a fight down the interdimensional time-phone.

But on the whole, I’m finding it hard to recommend it the way I would the last two.