General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Project Gutenberg (无双) (2018 film)

Project Gutenberg (無雙) is a 2018 Hong Kong crime thriller written and directed by Felix Chong Man-keung, starring Chow Yun-fat as the counterfeiting mastermind Painter and Aaron Kwok as the forged-money artist Lee Man.¹ The film follows the Hong Kong police hunt for a counterfeiting gang whose fake United States currency is nearly indistinguishable from real money, and it became one of the most successful Hong Kong films of its era, winning Best Film at the 38th Hong Kong Film Awards.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	無雙 (English release title: Project Gutenberg)⁴
Director and writer	Felix Chong Man-keung, co-writer of the Infernal Affairs trilogy; his second solo directing feature⁵
Cast	Chow Yun-fat (Painter), Aaron Kwok (Lee Man), Zhang Jingchu (Yuen Man), Feng Wenjuan, Liu Kai-chi⁴
Release	30 September 2018 (mainland China), 4 October 2018 (Hong Kong), 5 October 2018 (Taiwan); 130 minutes⁶^•⁷
Box office	Mainland gross passed RMB 1 billion within three weeks; by late October it exceeded RMB 1.2 billion, with Hong Kong receipts over HK$30 million and a global total approaching HK$1.5 billion⁸^•⁹
Hong Kong Film Awards	17 nominations and 7 wins at the 38th edition, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay³
Production companies	Bona Film Group, Emperor Film Production, and Shanghai Alibaba Pictures, among others¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

Lee Man, a painter who forged artwork, is arrested in Thailand and extradited to Hong Kong. The police, pursuing the elusive head of a counterfeiting operation known only as Painter, offer Lee Man turned-witness status if he reveals Painter's true identity.⁷ In flashback, Lee Man recounts how, as a struggling artist in 1990s Vancouver alongside his painter girlfriend Yuen Man, he was recruited into Painter's gang. The group travels across Europe, Asia, and North America to defeat every security feature of the 1996-series United States $100 bill and produce nearly perfect "superdollars", while Lee Man is drawn into the gang's killings and repeatedly fails to escape.⁷

The film's central twist, in which the seemingly timid witness turns out to be the mastermind and the figure he described is partly a fabrication, drew immediate comparisons to Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995). After the film won the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film, the South China Morning Post reported that professional critics and general moviegoers had accused the twist of being a rip-off of the 1995 film.¹ Chong responded publicly to the comparison, saying he had enjoyed working on the script.¹¹

Production

A ten-year development. Chong began researching counterfeit currency in 2008, after finishing the Infernal Affairs trilogy, and wrote a first-draft script that year. He drew on three real counterfeiting cases from the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, including one in which a fleeing counterfeiter was arrested at a remote farm still operating his printing press.¹²^•¹³ The project stalled for a decade: because the film required the mainland Chinese market and the counterfeiting subject was considered sensitive in 2008, it could not pass censorship review and attracted no investors.¹³

Authenticity and legal limits. Because counterfeiting was rarely depicted in Chinese-language cinema, Chong and his crew studied real cases and operated an intaglio printing (engraved-plate printing used for banknotes) press themselves to understand the process.¹⁴ The prop banknotes followed local law in the Canadian and Thai shooting locations: they were printed smaller than genuine bills, bore a distorted Franklin portrait, and carried the production company's logo. Since the film depicts the 1996-series US dollar, the crew bought genuine notes from antique shops for close-up shots.¹² Chong joked that, as the film prints US dollars, even the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had no jurisdiction over it.¹⁵ The prop question was live in Hong Kong at the time: in May 2018, two film prop masters had been convicted over prop banknotes from other productions whose "Props" markings were judged too hard to spot, a verdict the Hong Kong Film Workers Union called unprecedented in the global film industry.¹⁶

The counterfeit sequences. Reviewers singled out the film's methodical depiction of the counterfeiting process, from ink and paper selection to the printing machinery, as its principal attraction; the Paper's review noted it details every step and the provenance of each material.¹⁶ Producer Yu Dong of Bona said the paper used for the prop bills was made by pulping genuine one-dollar notes and reprinting them as $100 bills, and that the film ultimately printed 500 tons of prop "US currency".¹⁶

Reception and box office

The film opened in mainland China on 30 September 2018, in the National Day holiday window against Hello, Mrs. Money and Zhang Yimou's Shadow.⁶^•¹⁷ It built success on word of mouth: by 21 October 2018 it had passed RMB 1 billion and had been the single-day box-office champion for 19 consecutive days, with audiences in second- and fourth-tier cities supplying much of its attendance.⁸ By the end of October, the mainland gross had exceeded RMB 1.2 billion, Hong Kong receipts topped HK$30 million, and the worldwide total was approaching HK$1.5 billion.⁹

Critical response. Reviewers generally praised the production values and the two lead performances while dividing over the plotting. The Hollywood Reporter's Edmund Lee wrote that, for all the incredulity its storytelling induces, the film affords Chow Yun-fat the most intriguing part he has played in years.¹⁸ LoveHKFilm called it a very entertaining crime saga somewhat undone by its own mind-bending twists, absolutely worth it for Chow's super-charismatic performance.⁴ Time Out's review lamented a lack of originality in a film boasting Chow, Kwok, and the writer of Infernal Affairs.¹⁹ A recurring criticism was that the twist-heavy second half becomes increasingly hard to follow, particularly after the counterfeiting expert Sau Ching (Feng Wenjuan) enters the story.²⁰

Awards

At the 38th Hong Kong Film Awards, held on 14 April 2019 at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, Project Gutenberg received 17 nominations and won 7 awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design, making it the ceremony's biggest winner.³^•¹⁰ Aaron Kwok, accepting an honor elsewhere, thanked Chong for creating such a complex character for him to play.²¹

Significance for Hong Kong cinema

The film's success came while Hong Kong cinema remained in an extended commercial slump, and LoveHKFilm credited part of its appeal to nostalgia: Chow Yun-fat playing effortlessly cool in a crime action drama, the kind of larger-than-life role his fans had waited two decades to see again, though here as a villain rather than a hero.⁴ As a Hong Kong-mainland co-production backed by Bona, Emperor, and Alibaba Pictures, it also demonstrated the commercial model by which Hong Kong genre filmmaking reached the mainland market in the late 2010s.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026