Here is a very silly and yet fiendishly watchable heist thriller that features three members – Edan Lui, Anson Lo and Keung To – of the Hong Kong Cantopop boyband Mirror in major roles. That’s worth knowing not because they break into song at any point, but because that explains the film’s prepackaged feel and why at least one of the actors, Keung To, feels so weirdly miscast as a ruthless gangster. But as with much of the plot mechanics in this film, it’s best not to think too much and just roll with punches.
The obscure objects of desire here are vintage watches: specifically a trio of timepieces owned at one point by Pablo Picasso and a fourth watch alleged to have been the first watch on the moon, worn by Buzz Aldrin. (Turns out Neil Armstrong left his watch on the spacecraft when he took those first small steps.)
Uncle (Keung To), the aforementioned ruthless gangster who has taken over his late relative’s underworld nickname, runs a stolen goods operation that specialises in items such as watches and he has a client who wants the Picasso set. Those are in a vault in a semi-legit dealership in Tokyo, so Uncle puts together a team to steal the watches, replace them with plausible replicas – the making of the latter is the speciality of bespectacled horological scam artist Vincent Ma (Edan Lui) – and bring them back to Hong Kong.
Uncle’s trusted lieutenant Chief (mildly grizzled veteran Louis Cheung) is put in charge of the operation, which also includes Chief’s longstanding sidekick Mario (Michael Ning, a hoot) who is an explosives expert, and new recruit Yoh (Anson Lo), an ace safe-cracker. Even though pretty but naive Yoh is warned by his yarn-shop-owner mother (Luna Shaw) – herself also a safe-cracker on the side – that these men had something to do with the death of Yoh’s brother, he goes along for the money because, true to crime-movie cliche, mom needs money for a crucial operation.
You can tell director Kim-Wai Yuen has Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven series in mind by the way he lights the scenes, edits for comic effect and uses voiceover to explain the step-by-step process required to pull off the heist. Get ready for much CGI footage showing how locks work, and montages of people assembling the tiny little parts that go into watches. It’s as if the film was made for people who loved playing with Lego or Meccano as children but have grown up and think they’re supposed to like movies about bad-ass gangsters – but really they just want to see footage of mechanical stuff working. In some ways it’s like those mesmerising autonomous sensory meridian response videos of pigments being mixed or things being squashed that pop up on social media, which would explain why this film is oddly pleasing, even if it’s totally daft.
• The Moon Thieves is in UK cinemas from 23 February, and in Australia on 22 February.
