DVD Review – Dragon (2011)

For Donnie Yen, the Chinese martial arts star that has as yet neglected to reach for Hollywood money and make a Western crossover taken by the likes of Jackie Chan and Jet Li, Dragon isn’t an appropriate display of the man’s talent. Uncomfortably, broadly comic in the opening third, which depicts his family man Liu Jinxi as a bumbling cartoon, Yen only works as the intense, mildly tortured character of the film’s middle and end sections. Only then, it’s too late – Yen is already stranded in a visually inventive but messy mixture of comedy, action and gangster epic.

Nominated for a pile of Hong Kong Film Awards, Dragon has some success in its giddy fight scenes (choreographed by Yen). But even those can’t help themselves from succumbing to too-fancy camera tricks, an overload of the MTV style typified by face-offs switching from fast-mo to slo-mo in an awkward rhythm (those that argue they can’t see the action for the camerawork in Hollywood blockbusters should probably avoid this film).

The camerawork is indicative of the film elsewhere – Dragon just isn’t sure what it wants to be. It could be comedy, it could be a martial arts epic, or it could be a film noir, but that it doesn’t fully commit to any one genre leaves each element feeing unfulfilled. Hyperactive moviemaking, at the least, should leave the viewer feeling invigorated, but Dragon instead movies in soporific stops-and-starts. It’s a movie of pieces that don’t quite fit together.

Dragon’s main redeeming feature is its cinematography, which shows off some majestic, epic beauty of China on only a modest budget. You could also say it’s admirable that director Peter Chan takes the basic premise of a recent David Cronenberg thriller and dares to make his protagonist even less sympathetic; Liu Jinxi’s glimpsed-in-flashback past takes us to some surprisingly grizzly places which threaten to lose us altogether.

That’s no spoiler, by the way – Dragon makes clear almost from the off that Liu Jinxi isn’t who he says he is, but rather a man with a dark and violent past. Writer Aubrey Lam can’t be bothered to wait, ditching the mystery early and helpfully hinting from the start that Dragon is just an impatient martial arts version of A History of Violence.