In Liu Xiao and Qin Pengfei’s highly amusing straight-to-VOD actioner Run Amuck, a successful Virtual Reality shooting game called ‘Run for your Life’ gathers dozens of contestants for a highly-publicized final game with a winning prize of 10-million RMB, under the purview of the game’s instuctor, the ‘AK Queen’ (Clara Lee). Among the competing players are Baolong (Fang Yan), the cocky number one player, known for his ‘sultry’ victory dances, but also Shen Yue, aka “The Sniper Queen” (Zhang Haoyue), his usual runner-up. Run Amuck was probably shot concurrently to Wen Zhang’s Fat Buddies, as it shares its action director (Qin Pengfei), three cast members (Clara Lee, Zhang Menglu and Jackie Li), and a key desert shooting location with the aforementioned fat-suit comedy. Regardless of this truly fascinating filmmaking tidbit, it’s a fine slice of menatally-challenged, unassuming fun, full of amusing lapses in logic (it takes places in a virtual reality but once in the game the players still need a plane to get to the location of the competition, with one character fearing the parachute drop, even though it’s unreal), effective comic relief (Jackie Li and Zhao Yan are quite fun as a pair of bickering presenters who come to blows on a regular basis), and surprisingly solid – though budget-constrained – action scenes. Overtly comical music often sullies scenes, as do misguided attempts at actual emotion, but there’s enough dimensions to each of the generously-cleavaged characters (each one having a different, real life-based reason to join the game), that there’s the minimum requirement in dramatic tension on top of the desert-set tank-and-snipers action. Living-Goddess statue Clara Lee merely bookends the film, but it’s Zhang Menglu, who after her formidable turn in Fat Buddies steals the show here as a coke-sipping clutz. A sequel is generously set up, a low-stakes yet not unwelcome prospect. **1/2