“No More Bets” is a heavy-handed Chinese thriller about the evils of gambling, the perils of emigrating and the righteousness of Chinese policing as it pertains to international online scamming conspiracies.

Overlong and somewhat lumbering, it’s sometimes entertainingly suspenseful, built around a pop star/actor who plays a young programmer enslaved in an online gambling organization’s predatory Malaysian operation. But it’s xenophobic in the ways it lectures Chinese expats to only trust each other and the Motherland in the face of all these Malaysian/Singaporean scammers, thieves and human traffickers. There’s even a side swipe at a couple of “other” cultures China has beefs with (the Philippines, for instance) in its messaging.

Yes, it was a huge hit in China. So its Malay distributors have packaged it for release in North America, where I caught with an all-Asian audience in Durham, N.C.

Pan (Zhang Yixing) is a disgruntled 30ish programmer who has a backup plan when a promotion he was counting on goes to “Kevin.” He’s been recruited, along with a few others, with the promise of big bucks and a quick access to promotions with a Singaporean “Firefly” company.

Pan is cocky enough to drop his ID badge and stalk out in the middle of his a big promotion ceremony for his rival, and to hack into the phones of his fellow recruits and their smiling, glad-handing recruiter, Cai (Sunny Sun) before the plane even takes off.

But upon landing (in Singapore, I think), as they take a little walkabout, members of the group are ambushed by organized street gangs. Pan isn’t able to escape, and when the gangster Cai delivers a final blow, the jig is up.

They’ve been conned and kidnapped, and they’re taken — in hoods — to their new sweatshop. Their real “employer,” GoldenCarp.com, is a vast online conspiracy of scammers, recruiters, catfishers, human traffickers and enforcers.

Smooth-talking Mr. Lu (Chuan-jun Wang) is the charming “good cop” of the operation, promising big paydays — money sent back home to families that need it — and suggesting promotions and “freedom.” Eventually. But he packs a pistol and is utterly ruthless when it comes to his unwilling indentured servant workforce and the hapless Chinese gambling addicts they prey upon. Cai gets to be the “bad cop,” a brute who makes examples of those attempting to flee or get word about their enslavement out, “whistleblowers.” They’re beaten and tortured.

Pan resolves to outsmart these creeps, but he and we can’t help but notice the cultish “Money is EVERYthing” indoctrination that he and his fellow programmers and “employees” live under. Starved, housed in a filthy warehouse, they’re broken. He will almost certtainly be on his own.

But maybe he isn’t. Anna (Gina Chen Jin) is a beautiful model there under duress, one of the legion of multi-national “dealer” women used to smile and deal cards, to advertise and lure in new gamblers, who are then scammed via offers of “inside deals” which expose their online accounts to hacking and looting.

Anna’s back-story suggests a broad conspiracy as she was sabotaged at her modeling agency, entrapped by those who wrecked her career, lured to a not-really-named foreign country and just as much a slave to all this — despite promises of release when she reaches her “sales” goal — as Pan.

Conventional thrillers like this would spin around these two meeting, scheming and outsmarting their captors, but that only happens in the most teasing sense here.

“No More Bets” suggests all are helpless, especially the new college grad Tian (Talu Wang) whom we watch spiral into gambling addiction. Even his girlfriend (Ye Zhou) can’t break his habit, and his family melts down around him as his debts and addiction deepen and his exposure to Golden Carp’s predation grows.

Who can save them? Perhaps Madame Zhang (Mei Yong), the leader of a police task force eventually shamed into taking action and who lucks into leads.

Director and co-writer Shen Ao’s (“My Dear Liar”) narrative is meandering to the point of frustrating, and not simply because he’s avoiding the Hollywood touches by downplaying the two trapped and attractive victims — whom we’re meant to identify with — and their role in getting out of this predicament.

Tian’s descent into gambling is overwrought, melodramatic and yet at least familiar enought to feel “realistic”.

But with the introduction of the email-tapping Chinese police, “No More Bets” seems more nakedly agenda-driven. Local police are uniformly corrupt. When the Chinese task force finally makes its way into the country, only a powerful local Chinese expat businessman can be trusted to give them help and save them from the corrup cop “connected” mob that’s doing all these awful things to the innocent Chinese.

Why, exactly, does the film show villains praying to Buddha? People’s Republican fear of religion?

The film’s focus on “the other” as the source of a gambling-crazed culture’s woes is faintly racist right up to the film’s final image, which is nakedly racist. It’s a Byzantine Chinese version of every American thriller about cops battling “cartels” and their Spanish speaking minions South of the border.

Stretches of “Bets” work. And suspense builds as the stakes rise and we note how insidious this “organization” is and puzzle over how our heroine and hero will escape its clutches. It’s only when their scheming to escape is given short shrift to work in another lecture on the evils of gambling and the crusading efforts of civil rights-trampling Chinese police that we start to pay attention to the film’s darker failings.

Rating: violence

Cast: Zhang Yixing, Gina Chen Jin, Mei Yong, Sunny Sun, Chuan-jun Wang, Talu Wang and Ye Zhou and Talu Wang

Credits: Directed by Shen Ao, scripted by Shen Ao, Xu Luyang and Zhang Yifan. A Mega Films release.

Running time: 2:10