“There’s a storm coming, and I don’t know of any umbrella that can keep the city dry.” This is an actual quote from Revenge of the Green Dragons, an awful movie if I’ve ever seen one and a baffling one at that as Martin Scorsese has attached his name to the picture as an executive producer, presumably as a nod to co-writer and co-director Andy Lau going back to when Scorsese adapted Infernal Affairs into the Oscar winner The Departed. Fair enough, but Lau makes more than enough films and Scorsese didn’t need to come within a mile of this one and tarnish his reputation.
Then again, perhaps this 94-minute cut isn’t the only cut of the film out there. The trailer certainly includes shots that aren’t in the film and the characters are so poorly established there has to be more than what I saw. Of course, that won’t make the piss poor performances any better, but at this point a song and dance sequence and talking goat would have been an improvement over what I saw.
Based on a true story, the film centers on the rivalry between several Asian gangs in New York’s Chinatown and Queens neighborhoods in the 1980s, most specifically the Green Dragons and White Tigers, with an emphasis on two young Chinese boys, Sonny (Justin Chon) and Steven (Kevin Wu), both joining the Green Dragons at an early age and falling into the gang’s violent ways.
Covering about a decade in the gang’s violent history, beginning in 1983, the story (if you can call it that) sits back and watches as these guys go around killing people, seeking revenge and killing people, before attempting to import heroin into the country.
The cast doesn’t so much as act as they either yell as loud as they can or speak softly while sipping a glass of whiskey… you know, because that’s what big dog gangsters do… right? This is a question that struck me early and throughout the entire movie. Do real gangsters actually act like movie gangsters or do filmmakers only think real gangsters act like movie gangsters? You can place the blame on the actors, the writing, the directing or whatever you like, but there’s no ignoring the fact the behavior of the characters in this film is ridiculous.
For a movie based on a true story, reality seems to be a long lost concept on this narrative. The worst of the lot, by a mile, is Leonard Wu playing second in command of the Green Dragons. Sporting long hair and given some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard all year, mostly containing the word “fuck”, accompanied by a not-so-menacing glare. Nothing is worse than seeing people try and play tough, knowing full well they are anything but and this movie is riddled with such performances.
The direction doesn’t help much either as Lau and co-director Andrew Loo do very little to help these actors along. Several shots of characters looking off in the distance, a corny introduction of the gangs including a shot of the Green Dragons firing their weapons and yelling at… well, nothing as far as I could tell. Then there’s this voice over that dominates the first third of the film and it ruins any chance I had of caring about what was going on. I don’t go to a movie to have what I’m watching described to me by a narrator. If you’re going to have voice over it damn well better add something to the picture or axe it altogether.
And I can’t ignore the score provided by Mark Kilian (Pitch Perfect, Rendition). I don’t know if an electric guitar is all Kilian owns and that’s why this film plays like a Def Leppard video, but I’ll be damned if I have to endure another scene with screeching electric notes over the top of a supposedly dramatic slow motion shot. All the slow motion in this film only proved to make it longer, and not in the least bit dramatic.
It pains me to be so negative, but there isn’t a single redeeming quality when it comes to this movie and outside of doing Lau a favor, I can’t imagine why Scorsese would choose to have his name associated with it.
