"Colin Farrell plays a professional gambler who styles himself Lord Doyle, adrift in the Chinese gambling mecca of Macau, the Asian Vegas; he is a despised gweilo or foreign ghost. Farrell shows us a seedy guy with an outrageously spivvy moustache and a flop sweat, running up a massive bill at the kind of five-star establishment which tolerates this sort of thing on the tacit understanding that the guest will bet and lose massively at the hotel casino."
"Their transaction is calamitous, and yet Doyle prevents Dao Ming from being beaten up by the widow of a gambler she has driven to suicide. They become friends, or even spiritual lovers, an affair between two phantoms but in having a certain mysterious number, Doyle has ambiguously been given the means of his own redemption or destruction, forced to confront his own destiny as a hungry ghost, always gobbling and never sated."
A gambling addict named Lord Doyle drifts through Macau’s luxury hotels and casinos, accumulating debt and waking to growing chaos in his room. Doyle encounters Dao Ming, a charismatic broker whose calamitous transaction leads to an unexpected intervention and a complex bond. Their relationship becomes a spectral, possibly spiritual affair that places Doyle before a single consequential wager tied to a mysterious number. The wager forces Doyle to confront his identity as a hungry ghost, confronting themes of appetite, emptiness, and the possibility of redemption or annihilation. A secondary character, Betty, reads as cartoonish and undermines her plot purpose.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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