Octopus with Broken Arms (2024)

When the daughter of a wealthy businessman is kidnapped from his home, the police (Yihong Duan) are called just as the felons demand $100 millions as a ransom. "Zheng Bingrui" (Yang Xiao) has little faith in the authorities so decides to pay, and to follow the instructions for delivery he's getting over the phone. The girl's teacher "Li Huiping" (Liya Tong) feels partially responsible and insists on accompanying him. With cameras, trackers and microphones almost everywhere, we now follow their frankly rather preposterous journey and along the way learn a little about just what is motivating the criminals to persecute this outwardly upstanding citizen. There is plenty of action at the start, and as the underlying story starts to evolve, the plot becomes quite sophisticated in it's search for explanations and revenge, but sadly the acting isn't up to much and it really does lose it's way as it heads to a denouement that I found rather a convoluted cop out. There is one scene, incidental to most of the actual plot, that I did find subtly harrowing. A young lad is innocently bouncing up and down in his new light-up shoes whilst his mum fills out some forms at a nearby counter. Then he's gone. A victims of child kidnappers who will hope to sell him to wealthy "westerners" for up to $50,000! That's the punchy message that this film does deliver. It showcases the abhorrently profitable practice of trafficking in young children and the lengths to which parents will go, in anger and despair, to find them and or to avenge this epitome of cruelty as well as those to which the perpetrators will go regardless of the misery they cause. The octopus analogy makes sense at the end but it hasn't anywhere near the focus of something like "The Sound of Freedom" from last year. It's still worth a watch, though.