Review of Year of the Dragon (1985) by Aidan H — 21 Jun 2010

MICHAEL CIMINO has a distinctive way of making things look and sound, but he could never be accused of having a style. If style is a director's way of shaping and intensifying his audience's perceptions, then what Mr. Cimino has amounts to its very antithesis. In ''Year of the Dragon,'' a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn. That, even more than excess, was the fundamental problem with ''Heaven's Gate,'' and it is still every bit as egregious. It is no pleasure to report that Mr. Cimino's reputation as the man who best exemplifies what can go wrong with big-ego, big-budget film making remains unchallenged.

''Year of the Dragon,'' based on a much more fast-paced and informative novel by Robert Daley, tells what happens when this captain is assigned to Chinatown and charged with controlling the violence of the youth gangs there. He finds that his adversary is a handsome young businessman (played by John Lone, who had the title role in ''Iceman'') who also doubles as an underworld kingpin.

Though Mr. Cimino shepherds the whole movie toward a closing confrontation between these rivals, he typically deflates the ending by sapping the impact of their earlier encounters. They never seem to meet alone, since most of their talks take place in settings that are either overpopulated or full of attention-getting props. The conversations they do have are interrupted by constant and maladroit editing; indeed, the editing is so partial to uninteresting background detail and irrelevant reaction shots that it is the film's single worst feature. At times, Mr. Cimino further heightens his tendency to lose the actors in a larger tapestry by shooting them with a wide-angle lens.

As for the larger tapestry here, Chinatown was built in North Carolina for the film, and it has been recreated down to the last noodle. Production notes explain that close attention was paid to such details as the grading of street surfaces and the installation of pipes to vent steam from the manhole covers. However, the effect is that of a colossal blur, since Mr. Cimino has so little facility for focusing the attention on anything in particular. Even worse, all this meticulousness becomes crushingly literal. Without any gift for simplicity or shorthand, the director must spell out absolutely everything. To show that someone is a general, he must - and does, in one particularly overscaled sequence here - surround him with an entire army.

The actors fare particularly badly under such circumstances. Mr. Rourke, who almost always generates a relaxed, knowing magnetism, is entirely lost in the underwritten role of a middle-aged policeman. He must also grapple with the flat-footed, heavily scatological dialogue that seems just as out of place here as it did in ''Heaven's Gate.'' (The screenplay is by the director and Oliver Stone.) Mr. Rourke is never able to give much conviction to the lines that have him frequently comparing Chinatown's gangland troubles to the Vietnam War; this, like the motif of gang rape here and in ''Heaven's Gate,'' appears to have more to do with some larger vision of Mr. Cimino's than with the story at hand.

Still, Mr. Rourke manages to be more ingratiating and interesting than Ariane, the model who plays an upscale young newscaster with whom he has an affair. She is so ineffectual a part of the film's framework that she is even upstaged, in a nude scene, by a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge.