Review – Year of the Dragon

When a film starts out with a disclaimer about how it shouldn’t be considered a depiction of Asian Americans in general, you know you’re in for some racist crap. And this movie serves it up in abundance. Every other word out of protagonist Mickey Rourke’s mouth is some sort of racial epithet, and in a script by Oliver Stone you can bet there’s a wide variety of offensive language. Even the supposedly honest, upstanding members of New York’s Chinatown community turn out to be caught up with the Tongs in some way or another. Just about every loathsome sort of human behavior gets at least a little screen time at some point in the two plus hours it takes this dog to spin out. So I guess it might have a little freak show value, but not much else. The only good thing I can come up with to say about this movie is that it appears to have been the final nail in the coffin of Michael Cimino’s career as a big-budget film-maker. Knock on wood. Wish I’d skipped it