Lao Shi (2016)

Lao Shi: Directed by Johnny Ma. With Gang Chen, Nai An, Hongwei Wang, Zebin Zhang. A psychological thriller about a taxi driver battling bureaucracy and legal manipulation in China.

“To this point the series was fun, but little more than that.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIn spite of the strong themes, the early episodes were more or less letting JG play dressup and riff off early Mission Impossible scripts from the late 60s.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAgain, all that was fun, and no one plays dressup better than JG, but even the dead boyfriend arc and the amorous reporter arc and the daddy issues arc (and my least favorite arc, the spineless CIA handler who looks like he escaped from a sitcom)– even with all these, it was not really coming together.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIn this episode Abrams and the gang took it up a notch, especially the close which (as other reviewers here have said) involved cutting off a finger and letting QT (yes, THE QT) pound the u0026amp;%u0026amp;% out of JG.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003e(QT rarely gives a good performance as an actor, and besides who is going ever say NO to him, but here is not bad).u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eOpens the gateway to long run that followed.”