"An entrepreneur discovers that his heart transplant came from an organ harvesting enterprise and decides to risk everything for the woman who would be their next victim."
The Bleeding Edge is a cheaply made film that only really works because the premise is rooted in truth. It only works because of the reality that organ harvesting is, in fact, a thing in China. Between 1-1.5 million illegal transplants occur on an annual basis, with donors found by monitoring online conversations and arresting people with political or religious beliefs that conflict with the party in power. This is one of four films so far that have been made about the topic and it is quite unusual in that the atrocities that are being portrayed are still going on when usually you only find out long after it happens.
Without this prior knowledge, the film is actually very slow to get into. It is split into two different storylines, one that follows Jing (played by Anastasia Lin) who practises Falun Gong, and the other following James (played by Jay Clift) a western tech entrepreneur. The film takes its time to explain what is going on and leaves the audience rather unsure as to how these two different storylines are connected.
The plot itself is intrinsically interesting, with spying, torture, and political corruption & profiteering, and yet the acting feels so forced that you can't really take it seriously. Combine it with some poorly done special effects make-up that looks worse than an Instagram influencer's first attempt at making a believable disfigurement, much about the film becomes more laughable than dramatic or thrilling. In the third act, the film does start to pick up the pace thanks to a deadline being set, and from that point on there are some good scenes that are able to inject some tension. In general, however, the set design, and acting comes across sterile and poorly directed.
James serves as the primary protagonist for the film and takes a while to warm up to the role. Initially rather standoffish, there is no reason to care about the character or his plight, and having a sudden interest in finding out the truth is spurred by a single line of dialogue from throwaway characters and one awkward encounter with a nurse feels unnatural and unbelievable. Tony Bai, as the Warden, probably has the most screentime and the best performance of all the main cast, providing the only multi-dimensional character onscreen, with clear motivations and goals.
Unconvincing and bland, The Bleeding Edge brings an important human rights issue to the forefront but fails to make you really care about any of the characters enough to make you want them to succeed. There is nothing here to make the film stand out, and now that Netflix has released a documentary with the same name, this The Bleeding Edge will likely fade into obscurity.