Chalard Games Goeng

For my taste, it's a little bit overhyped abroad (81% from 4,000 people on IMDB seems a bit too high), but its original theme certainly doesn't put Thailand to shame. The story revolves around a girl who is a mathematical genius and decides to use her talents to make money by giving advice to her classmates during exams. The idea and the style of cheating is very imaginative (with a piano) and it becomes a decently suspenseful thriller during the final exam. If the main character wasn’t so ugly and they had shortened the running time by 20 minutes, I might have gone for a 4. But for Thailand, a smart and original film. 65%. (01.12.2017)

The premise, which turns cheating on exams into a suspenseful heist, isn't bad at all, and you quiver when the heroes send each other the answers to the questions created in barcodes on the pencils they hand out during the tests. The rest is truly a crisis of dreadfulness, with hideous camerawork, knee-jerk editing, and amateur acting flopping around in 130 minutes of grayish images that could have been cut down by a fifth just by running the ever-present slow motion at normal speed. I was in a more conciliatory mood thanks to the exhausting thrills the film slips in while bypassing the international SITC test, but the whole thing was brought down for me by the finale, where we are told that the right actually lies on the side of pointless one-and-done liberal arts tests that determine whether or not you’ll be someone in your life and not the other way around, when it should be more on the side of the characters who, with their clever and innovative circumventing of the ossified decision-making system will eventually win against the system and thus humble it. It is indeed a letdown here, even though the system only wins because one of the characters eventually spills all the shenanigans to the authorities out of his own selfishness. The confirmation of this status quo after two hours is simply a betrayal, comparable to if at the end of Ocean's Eleven, George Clooney had gone to the police to rat out his partners in crime and all the money they stole got taken away and returned to the casino. I don't know. (02.12.2017)