Mastermind review: Louis Koo plays detective in ludicrously bad Hong Kong mystery thriller

South China Morning Post - Oct 6, 2026

1/5 stars A fine line separates a labyrinthine murder thriller from an infuriatingly fragmented mess. With Mastermind, emerging Hong Kong writer-director James Hung Ling-ching (The Seventh Lie) crosses it with reckless abandon, delivering a detective mystery with such irredeemably awful plotting that genre fans will rarely have felt so insulted. Set over a single, relentlessly storm-soaked night in H City – a fictional, dystopian metropolis of 5 million starved of proper rule of law – the film...

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