[N]ot even the combined forces of Lloyd Dobler and the Fab Four can bring a spike of joy to this DOA period drama.

A quasi-inspirational story more than a thriller about a character who is designed to be a nearly irreproachable paragon of officially approved virtue, summons as much intrigue as a tedious chore.

There are quite a few similarities with "The Man Who Knew Infinity" (2015) in this film about the prodigious mathematical genius of Rong Jinzhen. By pure fluke, his problem-solving skills are spotted by teacher (Daniel Wu) who adopts the orphaned, rather subdued, boy into his close-knit family and provides him the opportunity to thrive. Over the next couple of hours we watch him (Haoran Liu) develop into an academic then into a man crucial to the efforts of his embryonic country as it struggles to recover from years of internal strife and to compete with the more established regional powers like the UK and the USA. It's to that latter nation that his Polish-born mentor "Liseiwicz" (John Cusack) escapes when the Kuomintang government in China falls and the communists take over - and these two men, on opposite sides of the world, soon become the epitome of intellectual rivals with the erstwhile pupil now working for the Chinese equivalent of Bletchley Park trying to keep pace with the incredibly complex "purple" and "black" ciphers being developed by the American National Security Agency. What's clear is the two men are being manipulated but their respective states and that is having - as Lieseiwicz predicted early on - quite a profound effect on their respective mental health and on Jinzhen's marriage to Ye Xiaoning. I quite liked the innovative way in which director Sicheng Che…

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