Review of Year of the Dragon (1985) by Kevin D — 14 Apr 2010

Zzzzzz. To quote the great Homer Simpson, "Boooooring!" That's exactly what this movie is. This movie is the exact opposite of Mommie Dearest. In that movie the leading role made the entire movie a joke.

In this movie, the leading role is the one good thing about the movie, but unfortunately the rest of the movie was a joke. I watched this on youtube, so some of it was edited out, the intimate scenes in particular if you know what I mean wink wink.

But those missing scenes had nothing to do with the final product. The basic premise of this movie is a racist super cop (Mickey Rourke) trying to take down the Chinese mafia. Rourke plays a man that has a fetish for women with short hair in this one.

This has to be one of Bruce Willis's favorite movies since he looks like Rourke does here. Willis looks like Rourke in this movie, he talks the same way, and Willis has the same mannerisms. There were so many things wrong with this movie.

The pacing was terrible. In one scene, a fairly important character dies. Following the moment when that character dies, the audience is rewarded with a boring ten minute scene where the old members of the Chinese mob talk about nonsense.

I lost track after that scene. So director Michael Cimino, decided to place the funeral scene of that important character right after that boring scene. Way to take the audience out of the movie, Michael, something you succeeded at several times over the course of this movie.

At that point I completely forgot that that character died. I thought some other major character just suddenly died. It seemed like Cimino was pulling a similar move to the unseen death of a major character in No Country For Old Men, but he wasn't.

I guess I just forgot that Cimino is terrible at structuring scenes and writing memorable characters and decent dialogue. It seems like Cimino's career peaked when The Deer Hunter was released and it nose dived right after he accepted his Best Director Oscar for it.

The most disappointing thing about this movie is that it was written by two Academy Award Winners, Cimino and my 2nd favorite director and my boy Oliver Stone. The movie could not live up to the prestige of those two men, well at least to the prestige of Stone.

It's pretty obvious to figure out what scenes Stone wrote: the ones about Vietnam. Seriously, the only person that talks about Vietnam as much as Oliver Stone is Walter from The Big Lebowski. Stone movies that reference Nam: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Talk Radio, JFK, Nixon, Heaven & Earth, and U-Turn.

I wouldn't be surprised if Stone mentioned Vietnam in Alexander even though that movie took place eons before anyone even knew what Vietnam was. Stone feels the need to mention Vietnam in every movie almost like how Spike Lee has to mention racial injustice in every one of his movies.

Oliver Stone, I love you, man, but I have news for you: the Vietnam War ended almost 40 years ago. Move on to a new issue. This message also goes out to Michael Moore. Stop blaming George Bush for your problems.

He isn't president anymore, there was no need for you to attack him in your terrible film Capitalism: A Love Story. Your attack and blame on Bush in that movie was out of place and unnecessary. Back to this movie: the side characters were terrible and undeveloped.

I didn't care for them at all. To make matters worse, the actors that played the side characters were absolutely horrendous. It seemed like Cimino hired people off the streets to play those roles.

No joke. I had a feeling this movie would be bad because its premise was so vague. I was wondering how they would carry it out for nearly 2 and a half hours. At the completion of the film I knew how they sustained the movie: they used an incomprehensible plot, if you want to call it a plot, that made no sense.

I really didn't know what the character's intentions were for much of this film. There really was no plot to this movie. The characters were insincere, and they spent most of this film threatening others without keeping their promises regarding the threats.

Right now I'm looking at the photo section of this movie in the corner of my screen and Mickey Rourke looks like Joe Lieberman. If I looked at that photo before I saw the movie, maybe I wouldn't have wasted my time watching it.

This movie had one of the most unintentionally hilarious goofs I've ever seen in a movie. In one scene you see a character in the bathroom, but there is a red stain on the camera. I was like, "Why is there a blood stain on the camera, there hasn't been an action scene in at least twenty minutes?" Apparently the editor didn't notice this careless mistake.

A few seconds later a person came from nowhere and violently strangled the character in the bathroom and this time there was no blood stain on the camera. The idiots that made this movie made a careless error and allowed the audience to predict a death scene before it happened.

Just to let you know, the blood stain returned to the camera a little later. I destroyed this movie pretty badly, so I'll tell you the few good things about it. I'm waiting until now to tell you the good stuff because I wanted to hammer into your head exactly how bad this movie was.

Rourke was the only pro in the cast. He had a very good performance. The movie looked good from a technical standpoint and the infrequent action scenes were done well. The violence was cool and it was graphically bloody.

There were some truly cool and gory deaths in this movie. I mentioned earlier how this movie was an influence to Bruce Willis, well I also think it had an influence on Michael Bay based on how over the top the violence was and some unnecessary and hilarious explosions that made no sense.

Finally, the musical score in this movie was great. Not as good as the one in The Deer Hunter or The Elephant Man/Platoon, but it was still very good. I think Deer Hunter takes the cake as the best musical core in a movie.

I barely made it through this movie. I was considering walking out on it, but I wanted to stick through it. I'm glad I did because I think I wrote my best and funniest review so far. The movie has a few unintentional laughs and some cool death scenes, but in all honestly it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen.