The problems with Revenge Of The Green Dragons start at the title, and the false expectations it sets up. With a title like that, one would expect an entertaining, pulpy crime drama where we as viewers experience the vicarious excitement of doing illegal things. Our heroes would be criminals, sure, but they’d have a code of honor that puts them morally ahead of their enemies. And we would thrill to watching them wreaking a grisly vengeance on all who opposed them.
But no: The Green Dragons are just straight up assholes that beat up little kids for no reason.
Of course, this is the reality of these gangs, and an equally valid thing for a movie to be about. But when you give it a name like Revenge Of The Green Dragons, people are going to think a little less Alan Clarke and a little more Cheh Chang. And indeed, it would be a very impressive feat to have combined the two approaches, if such a thing were possible. Which they couldn’t, mainly because it isn’t. So here we are.
Co-directors War-Keung Lau (Infernal Affairs) and Andrew Loo and executive producer Martin Scorsese (The Departed, just so you guys know I know) seem to want to split the difference. Which I reckon would have been pretty impressive if had they pulled it off.
Inspired by true events (the event mainly being that the filmmakers have watched Goodfellas a bunch), Revenge Of The Green Dragons is the story of Sonny (Justin Chon), an immigrant who arrives in America in the early eighties and, along with his foster brother Steven (Kevin Wu), quickly finds himself involved with the Green Dragons, a gang that terrorizes the streets of New York’s Chinatown district.
Or, more accurately, it’s the story of Sonny standing around while a lot of stuff happens all around him.
Yes, once again we’re in the world of the passive protagonist, who gets the thematically resonant voice over but who barely does much of anything in the story itself.
Weird that out of everything that’s the aspect they stuck to from real life…
This is a plug-and-play gangster saga. The backdrop of Chinese immigrants in the mid eighties is a fairly unexplored region to tell a story in. With defter handling, some trenchant cultural commentary could have been made, wrapped in the palatable guise of a genre piece, as some of the best political commentaries are.
Which is not what happens here at all. Instead, it’s mostly a by-the-numbers crime story with almost zero cultural specificity. They pay a bit of lip service here and there to the Chinese immigrant experience (and indeed, these are the best parts of the movie). But by and large, it’s the same cliches you’ve seen a thousand times before, regurgitated with an unseemly lack of self-awareness.
There’s very little work done to make it feel of the era it’s supposed to be representing. There’s nothing in there besides the anvilicious news clips (Seriously? Was single every top story about immigrants back then?) that indicate that this is supposed to be the late eighties. I’m not asking for everybody to be rolling around in Members Only jackets and driving Maximas, but if there’s no real textural difference between your representation of a very specific time and place and the modern world outside our window, then what’s the point?
As far as acting goes, it’s variable at best. The street soldiers pitch their performances at the level of thugs from a Death Wish sequel. And bereft of a Charles Bronson to keep them in line, they indulge in a whole lot of swearing and an absurd amount of macho posturing. But given how skimpy the script is at handing out genuine character beats, they can hardly be held responsible for trying so hard to make it work.
But when the focus is on upper management, things are a little better. As Pete, the leader of the Dragons, Harry Shum Jr. radiates middle management menace. And Eugenia Yuan makes the most of her limited screen time as Snakehead Mama. Ray Liotta shows up as well, putting in a nicely low-key appearance as a Fed who is convinced that the Chinese immigration explosion is going to create a whole new criminal empire. As the movie proves, he has a point. But the vaguely xenophobic way he talks about it makes him an ambiguous hero at best…
Having read the New Yorker article this movie was based on just throws all of this into a deeper shade of ill-conceived. In real life, our “hero” Sonny isn’t the integral character, or all that much less morally culpable than anyone else. And his brother Steven, marked here as the unstable ‘O-Dog’ of the gang, barely rates mentioning in the article.
Almost everything that happened in real life happens in the movie, but coated with a thick layer of bullshit that makes me wonder what the point was in the first place.
At the heart of it is… it’s just not that interesting of a story. It’s the drama of a movie playing out in real life. Which loses something when you translate it back into cinema. Especially when, as this and so many other “inspired by true events” adaptations tend to do, sand off the edges and streamline the narrative to fit it into the shape of a movie. Which is one of those things I hate to bring up, because it’s such a cliche, but it’s true: why is that the go-to instinct? Why, when somebody describes something as being “just like a movie”… why would anybody’s first instinct be “Hey! Let’s turn it into that thing this reminds us of! Let’s translate this implausible real life event into a format where this sort of thing happens all the time?
And why, of all people, would that “anybody” be Martin Scorsese?
So what, exactly, is the point of Revenge Of The Green Dragons? What are they trying to say?
Because you can’t have it both ways: Either it’s a dark, gritty exploitation thriller taking place against the backdrop of 80s era New York; or it’s a serious minded and harrowing cautionary tale and an indictment of America’s failures; a scorching condemnation of the ambivalence towards foreigners that drives them to destroy themselves.
If they wanted to do the first, they forgot to make it fun. And if it’s supposed to be the latter, than they’ve compromised the integrity of the message by focusing so completely on the overheated and melodramatic criminal aspects.
And the thing of it is, the story of Tina, the daughter of a faded rock star whose fate becomes intertwined with that of the Dragons, has all the elements needed to tell the tale they should have been shooting for in the first place. Her story in real life is a much more compelling tale, and really captures the true tragedy of the Green Dragons’ reign of terror. But turning her into a generic love interest for Sonny flattens whatever point there is to be made here.
(And considering the real-life Sonny’s possible role in Tina’s story, it’s a deeply, deeply troubling creative choice they made…)
Worst of all is the wholly fabricated ending. After everything, we get a completely gratuitous and deliberately aggravating twist that feints towards delivering some kind of catharsis, only to take it away and to laugh at us for even thinking they’d deliver the payoff they were so careful to set up in the first place.
I don’t know whether it’s nihilism or just plain old bullshit, but I know which one I’m leaning towards…
I’d like to think the impulse here was a positive one: to portray a uniquely Asian/American story, and to bring to light a little seen aspect of the recent past. But the compromises and the scrubbing clean of the complicated edges result in a profoundly unrewarding experience.
SPECIAL FEATURES
A couple of nonessential deleted scenes (though one with Ray Liotta would have been worth including to lend some interesting texture to his actions in the actual film); a featurette on the cast which made me want to see them all reunited for a much better movie; A couple of short extras about the detailed production design and fashion coordination that was apparently completely lost on me; and a less-than-edifying commentary by Lau and Loo.
