Review | Crypto Storm movie review: anti-corruption thriller is an OK watch – albeit wholly unrealistic about how Hong Kong graft-busters operate

The latest film in the most farcical crime thriller series Hong Kong cinema has produced in the past 10 years, Crypto Storm is about a bank in trouble

The series’ lead actor, Louis Koo, is absent but the cast are good-looking and the storytelling crisp if you are willing to forget how nonsensical it is

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Ron Ng (front) in a still from “Crypto Storm” (category IIB; Cantonese), directed by Terry Ng and co-starring Edward Ma and Justin Cheung.

Published: 12:36pm, 25 Jan 2024

2/5 stars

Just when you thought you’d seen the last of the most hopelessly inept crime thriller series in Hong Kong cinema in the past 10 years, along comes Crypto Storm.

Between 2014’s Z Storm and 2021’s G Storm, the five-film Storm series created by director David Lam Tak-luk and regular writer Wong Ho-wah subjected its audience to a range of laughably ridiculous scenarios involving the Hong Kong Police Force and Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) that play out like poorly researched fan fiction.

Purportedly the first feature in a new spin-off series, Crypto Storm is co-produced by Lam and Edmond Wong Chi-mun, who co-scripted the story with Wong Ho-wah.

It is the third film of incoming series director Terry Ng Ka-wai (Pretty Heart, The Brotherhood of Rebel) and easily his worst to date.

At the centre of this latest Storm is a financially struggling Hong Kong bank headed by president Sung Tse-man (Justin Cheung Kin-sing), who is steadfast in persuading the board of directors to greenlight his proposal to acquire a cryptocurrency exchange platform in the hope it will make a big profit and save the family business.