Revenge of the Green Dragons
0/4
Starring: Justin Chon, Harry Shum Jr., Kevin Wu, Ray Liotta, Shuya Chung
Rated R for Strong Violence including a Sexual Assault, Pervasive Language, Some Drug Use and Sexual Content
The first 15 minutes of this movie are actively unpleasant. During this time, we see human smuggling victims being forced into slave labor, a kid being beaten bloody by young gangsters, a second kid being forced to defecated on the injured boy before being abducted and forced into the gang (and stolen from his mother, who will later witness him murder two people in cold blood) and watch his friend suffer a similar fate. I wanted to turn this movie off and not look back. But I held out hope that it would get better. That there would be some point to this savagery. Let me save you the trouble and say that no, there isn't.
I'd go over the plot, but there really isn't one. It's 90 minutes of watching the scum of the Earth actively screw each other over and murder each other. It's wanton brutality. There is no point to any of this. The IMDb page says: "Two best friends rise through the ranks of New York's Chinese underworld in the 1980's." I guess that might be true, although one of the friends, a brutal gangster named Steven (Wu) has so little screen time with his alleged best bro, the protagonist named Sonny (Chon) that I must have missed this information from the film. It's all about the violence, which is so cynical and mean that I just felt sad and dirty.
This movie is ultra-violent. Scene after scene of brutality after brutality. People are shot, tortured, raped, murdered, enslaved...the list goes on. It is often said that anything can be justified in cinema as long as it's handled well, and that's certainly true. But it isn't here. There's no point to any of this. The plot never makes much sense. The characters are so badly defined that they would be robbed of any sort of payoff if the bad acting didn't sink the film already. Or the dialogue, which is so overwritten that not even Gong Li could save it.
As I was watching this movie, I thought of "City of God," another movie which covered similar ground. It was just as violent, and included violence by and against small children. Just like this movie. But that movie had passion, energy, and the joys of filmmaking. This movie is so cold, so cynical, and so pointless that all I felt while watching this movie was anger and ugliness. I felt like I was trapped in a bucket of sludge that stank to high heaven. I felt like I needed to take a shower.
The acting is just as bad as the rest of the film. Justin Chon has the presence and zest of wallpaper. He has all the charisma and screen presence of a house plant. Harry Shum Jr. is a woeful choice for the Machiavellian villain. That's right. Mike Chang from "Glee" is playing a mafia boss. His Paul is meant to be a sophisticated, cultured killer who runs a mafia like some sort of warped intellectual, but he's neither clever nor interesting. He'd be laughable if he wasn't so boring. It's impossible to remember who YouTube star Kevin Wu is playing in this movie unless he's on screen. And veteran psycho Ray Liotta turns up as an FBI agent whose xenophobia would make Joe Arpaio proud.
Even aside from my moral objections to this film, it's still a piece of crap. The acting is uniformly terrible. The only interest the characters generate comes from how much I was actively wishing for them to suffer horrible, bloody deaths. Relationships, such as the romance between Sonny and a girl named Tina (Chang) are so badly developed that they never gain any momentum or emotional charge. The dialogue is consistently awful. The plot rarely makes sense. Half the scenes that had to have been in the script seem to be missing. The list goes on and on.
"Revenge of the Green Dragons," which is not a sequel, by the way (just in case you were asking), was co-directed by Andrew Lau, whose "Internal Affairs" was the basis for the brilliant Martin Scorsese thriller, "The Departed." While Scorcese had no idea that "The Departed" was a remake, it's rather amazing that Lau is competent enough to create something decent enough for even Scorcese to turn into gold. Even more amazing is that Scorcese is an executive producer of this movie. Only he can tell you why he allowed his good name to even be associated with this piece of filth.
I have nothing against violence or cruelty in movies. Or cynicism and mean-spiritedness. They have their place. But it's the director's job to use them in a constructive way. That doesn't happen here. This is just a bad movie that is rotten to the core.
Starring: Justin Chon, Harry Shum Jr., Kevin Wu, Ray Liotta, Shuya Chung
Rated R for Strong Violence including a Sexual Assault, Pervasive Language, Some Drug Use and Sexual Content
The first 15 minutes of this movie are actively unpleasant. During this time, we see human smuggling victims being forced into slave labor, a kid being beaten bloody by young gangsters, a second kid being forced to defecated on the injured boy before being abducted and forced into the gang (and stolen from his mother, who will later witness him murder two people in cold blood) and watch his friend suffer a similar fate. I wanted to turn this movie off and not look back. But I held out hope that it would get better. That there would be some point to this savagery. Let me save you the trouble and say that no, there isn't.
I'd go over the plot, but there really isn't one. It's 90 minutes of watching the scum of the Earth actively screw each other over and murder each other. It's wanton brutality. There is no point to any of this. The IMDb page says: "Two best friends rise through the ranks of New York's Chinese underworld in the 1980's." I guess that might be true, although one of the friends, a brutal gangster named Steven (Wu) has so little screen time with his alleged best bro, the protagonist named Sonny (Chon) that I must have missed this information from the film. It's all about the violence, which is so cynical and mean that I just felt sad and dirty.
This movie is ultra-violent. Scene after scene of brutality after brutality. People are shot, tortured, raped, murdered, enslaved...the list goes on. It is often said that anything can be justified in cinema as long as it's handled well, and that's certainly true. But it isn't here. There's no point to any of this. The plot never makes much sense. The characters are so badly defined that they would be robbed of any sort of payoff if the bad acting didn't sink the film already. Or the dialogue, which is so overwritten that not even Gong Li could save it.
As I was watching this movie, I thought of "City of God," another movie which covered similar ground. It was just as violent, and included violence by and against small children. Just like this movie. But that movie had passion, energy, and the joys of filmmaking. This movie is so cold, so cynical, and so pointless that all I felt while watching this movie was anger and ugliness. I felt like I was trapped in a bucket of sludge that stank to high heaven. I felt like I needed to take a shower.
The acting is just as bad as the rest of the film. Justin Chon has the presence and zest of wallpaper. He has all the charisma and screen presence of a house plant. Harry Shum Jr. is a woeful choice for the Machiavellian villain. That's right. Mike Chang from "Glee" is playing a mafia boss. His Paul is meant to be a sophisticated, cultured killer who runs a mafia like some sort of warped intellectual, but he's neither clever nor interesting. He'd be laughable if he wasn't so boring. It's impossible to remember who YouTube star Kevin Wu is playing in this movie unless he's on screen. And veteran psycho Ray Liotta turns up as an FBI agent whose xenophobia would make Joe Arpaio proud.
Even aside from my moral objections to this film, it's still a piece of crap. The acting is uniformly terrible. The only interest the characters generate comes from how much I was actively wishing for them to suffer horrible, bloody deaths. Relationships, such as the romance between Sonny and a girl named Tina (Chang) are so badly developed that they never gain any momentum or emotional charge. The dialogue is consistently awful. The plot rarely makes sense. Half the scenes that had to have been in the script seem to be missing. The list goes on and on.
"Revenge of the Green Dragons," which is not a sequel, by the way (just in case you were asking), was co-directed by Andrew Lau, whose "Internal Affairs" was the basis for the brilliant Martin Scorsese thriller, "The Departed." While Scorcese had no idea that "The Departed" was a remake, it's rather amazing that Lau is competent enough to create something decent enough for even Scorcese to turn into gold. Even more amazing is that Scorcese is an executive producer of this movie. Only he can tell you why he allowed his good name to even be associated with this piece of filth.
I have nothing against violence or cruelty in movies. Or cynicism and mean-spiritedness. They have their place. But it's the director's job to use them in a constructive way. That doesn't happen here. This is just a bad movie that is rotten to the core.
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