AllMovie

Even to a native Russian speaker, the title of this avant-garde noir adventure movie doesn't make a lot of sense. In English, it really does come out to something closely resembling Dude Water Winner. "Lokh" is the colloquial term for "sucker," possibly "dude," and it's used to describe a gullible person, usually with money, who can easily be tricked. "Pobeditel Vody" literally means "winner of water" or "water winner." In the story, Gorelikov and his friend Kostya run a hole-in-the-wall computer store in Moscow specializing in computer games. They are doing just fine until one day the ubiquitous racketeers who plague the city come in and trash his store, killing Kostya, who had survived as a soldier in the Afghan war. The criminal gangs would never imagine that they have anything to fear from the surviving techno-dweeb, but he proves to have a deep knowledge of how to transform cheap technology into wonder-working tools, as he seeks his revenge against them. Sergei Kurekhin who plays Gorelikov, is a well-known Russian avant-garde pianist and he was a noticeable figure in Russian underground rock. He has a well-established taste for the bizarre, so maybe the whole movie is an elaborate joke. One foreign reviewer found it vastly entertaining as an adventure offering an unconventional view of Moscow's underground life.