YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

Still licking his wounds after the disastrous release of HEAVEN’S GATE/’80*, writer/director Michael Cimino took five years to get his next project out.  The wait proved fatal, not because the film was lousy, it’s an acceptable policier (Next Generation Chinatown Mob Boss meets Next Generation Chinatown Top Cop), but from pent up expectations after Cimino’s hubristic fall from his Oscar-winning DEER HUNTER.  A miscast thirty-three yr-old Mickey Rourke, with his up-front Ring-A-Ding attitude (cocked Sinatra chapeau included) and varying amounts of gray at the temples, is the Police Captain vowing to sweep out old Tong War Hostilities & protection rackets in Chinatown , yin to John Lone’s yang as new broom for the Chinese Mafia, shaking up Chinatown’s old guard by pushing to control rather than merely facilitate local drug trafficking.  Matching ambitions gets the both of them after suitable bloodshed & suspense, leading to the inevitable mano-a-mano death match.  Nothing wrong there, with Lone the best thing in here along with some nicely gauged perversities on the way (a doomed undercover baby cop; a nun who specializes in Chinese dialects; revenge hits in sludgy tofu pits as well as nice suburban homes; overseas negotiations with a jungle drug lord), all of it undercut by stilted dialogue (Oliver Stone co-wrote) and some truly terrible acting.  None worse then debuting love interest Ariane, who barely worked again.  On the other hand, where else are you going to see a Polish funeral accompanied by Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony?

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Quickly pulled after opening at 219 minutes, HEAVEN’S GATE was defensively reduced (to 149"), then dumped again after brief return engagements.   Now restored to more or less the original cut, rep much improved . . . by some.  Cimino never recovered (3 flop films post-DRAGON in 40 years).  But did the deserved catastrophe of GATE or the undeserved critical & commercial triumph of THE DEER HUNTER/’78 do him in?

DOUBLE-BILL: Under the watchful eye of star/producer Clint Eastwood, lots of promise on display in Cimino debut THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT/’74 (with Jeff Bridges stealing the pic).  OR: For cinema’s greatest (and funniest) Chinatown Tong War, Buster Keaton’s THE CAMERAMAN/’28.