steven@ism70.UUCP (08/22/85)
YEAR OF THE DRAGON Starring Mickey Rourke, John Lone and Ariane. Also starring Leonard Termo, Ray Barry and Caroline Kava. Directed by Michael Cimino. Written by Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone. Based on the novel by Robert Daley. Produced by Dino DeLaurentiis. Photographed and Operated by Alex Thomson. Production Designed by Wolf Kroeger. Edited by Francios Bonnot. Music by David Mansfield. From Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures (1985). Jack Kroll wrote, "It's the kind of bad movie I'd happily sit through again." Richard Corliss called it "the pits." Gary Franklin gave it a 10. Friend of mine saw it and absolutely hated it. Not only that, I'm Chinese. So I feel kind of stupid giving any kind of lukewarm response to Year of the Dragon. I feel like I should be ranting or raving about it. Detective Stanley White (Mickey Rourke) upsets all the old arrangements and truces when he's assigned to clean up the youth gang problem in New York's Chinatown. His nemesis, crime lord Joey Tai (John Lone), also upsets the Chinatown elders when he forges ahead boldly and bloodily to increase his power base and the Chinese Mafia's share of the heroin business. The two ride this rivalry to its inevitable shoot 'em up conclusion. This is a bad film, but it's an interesting kind of bad. It's definitely not boring bad. It's psychotic bad; full of operatic excesses that seem incredibly dumb and illogical from one standpoint and so overboard they're entertaining from other vantages. Gory? Yes. Violent? Absolutely. Racist? Perhaps. Rourke's character may be completely unlikeable, but he's an interesting person: his being an asshole to everyone around him provides his motivating force for cleaning up Chinatown. I'll give Oliver Stone and Michael Cimino that one. Cimino, thanks to Heaven's Gate, is one of Hollywood's most controversial directors. Stone's most pertinent previous screen credit is his screenplay for DePalma's version of Scarface, another bloody, violent and operatic criminal opus. The script crams down hokey coincidences with conveniently speechy dialogue to give you the "big" message. For example, White just so happens to dine with a Chinese news reporter to talk about cleaning up Chinatown in a restaurant that just so happens to be owned by Chinatown's current kingpin which just so happens to the scene of a vicious gunfight. The script gives us high-pitched monologues from White comparing his battle to clean up Chinatown now to his Vietnam experience. Subtle it ain't. Probably too much of the novel's incidents have been retained; the story needs streamlining. Characters appear, get dropped and are picked up again for story movement without a nod as to what they've done and where they've been offscreen. The relationships are all acted out at the same feverishly high pitch but with the same disjointedness. Nobody develops. On the plus side, the story does swirl through a lot of interesting locales and meets some neat people. And if the tone and believability swing wildly out of range, Year of the Dragon always has the sense that its all the product of one source. After coming from out of insipid, dull pictures like Fright Night and Weird Science, that's a major plus. Some things are beyond dispute; John Lone, as Joey Tai, is magnetic as the young turk in control. He brings a certain dignity to his portrayal of a criminal as smooth and sharp as a shard of glass. On the other hand, Ariane, as Rourke's love interest, gives an absolutely terrible performance. Admittedly it's a difficult role, full of wild emotional swings. Nonetheless, she's awful: stiff and unconvicing. David Mansfield's music sucks. He retreads motifs from Stanley Myer's score for The Deer Hunter without shame. It's the kind of intrusive and inappropriate scoring that hurts some otherwise nice scenes. Alex Thomson's cinematography is extremely good. His credit notes that he also served as his own camera operator, a rare occurence. Two stars out of four.