In A World Without Thieves, Andy Lau and Rene Liu play a pair of hustlers named Wang Bo and Wang Li. After completing a job, Wang Li starts to become disheartened at her choice in life, and decides to quit the business. Wang Bo reluctantly agrees at first, but decides to stay with Li to try and change her mind. As they are boarding a train, Li meets up with Dumbo (Wang Baoqiang), a country bumpkin who is taking his life's savings home to his village. Li wants to do a good deed to try and restore some karma, so she decides to keep Dumbo's money safe from the other thieves on the train, most notably a gang of talented crooks led by Uncle Li (portrayed by Mainland superstar Ge Bao), which includes a mysterious woman named Leaf (played by the gorgeous Lee Bing-Bing) who seems intent on stealing both Dumbo's money and Wang Bo's allegiance to his lover.

In some ways, I think that A World Without Thieves is the movie that Jingle Ma's 2000 disaster Tokyo Raiders (one of the worst Hong Kong movies ever made in my opinion) really wanted to be. It's a sharp heist picture where things are never dumbed down too much, nor made unnecessarily complicated. A World Without Thieves also has style to burn, but never goes overboard with the "MTV style". Mainland helmer Feng Xiao Gang seems to be one of decreasing number of directors who knows when to set aside the visual trickery. What makes A World Without Thieves such a solid picture is that Feng lets his actors do the work, unlike stuff like Tokyo Raiders, which ends up becoming so bogged down in looking cool that the end results feel more like a ninety-minute music video instead of an actual movie.

However, there is one major roadblock which prevents A World Without Thieves from being a great film instead of just a good one, and its' name is Dumbo. I don't know if it's the way the character is written or Wang Baoqiang's performance -- probably a combonation of both -- but I found Dumbo to be totally unbeliveable and, at times, downright annoying. I seriously cannot fathom that, in this day and age, anyone (even if they are from a remote portion of China) could possibly believe that there is no such thing as a thief, to the point where they scream that they're carrying lots of money. There were times where I wanted one of the other passengers on the train to shoot Dumbo or at least taze him, so he could just be put out of his misery. Despite this, I would still recommend A World Without Thieves for fans of heist/con movies, and fans of Andy Lau's as well, since this is some of his strongest work over the past few years.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]