Glaring Mishap
It’s a swing and a miss for Juno Mak’s fabled sophomore feature – but at least he took the damn swing.
Sons of the Neon Night
Director: Juno Mak • Writers: Juno Mak, Chou Man-yu
Starring: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Louis Koo, Lau Ching-wan, Tony Leung, Gao Yuanyuan
Hong Kong • 2hrs 5mins
Opens Hong Kong October 1 • III
Grade: C
After at least a decade and (rumour has it, per Variety) up to HK$400 million (25% of the cost of any MCU movie) on sets, VFX and a starry cast, Juno Mak Jeun-lung’s Sons of the Neon Night | 風林火山 has finally made its way into Hong Kong cinemas. If you can call it that. After an underwhelming debut at Cannes – in the same programme Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In crushed it in in 2023 – it feels as if distributors have dumped Mak’s labour of love with little fanfare and less PR. True to form the sharks are already circling, slamming it with histrionic labels like “the worst film of all time” and “terrible” and “a waste of time and money.” If you feel that way, godspeed, but I can promise you there’s much, much worse out there: Onpaku, Borderlands, that fucking Winnie the Pooh horror schlock. Does that mean it’s great? Not at all. Does it mean it makes a lick of sense? Hell, no. But you can’t deny Mak’s ambitions of putting a post-modern, hyper-stylised spin on the conventional Hong Kong crime thriller, the way he tried to do the same thing with his first film, the hopping vampire creeper Rigor Mortis, in 2013.
The stories about making it “snow” in Causeway Bay and rebuilding the entire Sogo corner on a Shenzhen soundstage have been circulating for ages, and when the first de-saturated (but indeed colour) images bleed onto the screen its easy to get your hopes up. Maybe the delays will be worth it? Sure the opening shot of the long lost Takeshi Kaneshiro reclining in one of the cross-harbour tunnels are head scratchers but there’s no denying it’s a striking image, the first of many. The problem is that’s all it is, and without any grasp on who the players are and what they want or need the beaufiful images are hollow.
Remember this guy?
To the best of my ability… Pharmaceutical giant Qin finds itself in the grips of a succession crisis, with the patriarch and chair in the hospital – and also under arrest – telling his younger son Moreton Li (Kaneshiro) to find his brother Maddox (Alex To Tak-wai) and bring him home so he can die knowing the company is in good, family hands. Maddox is a fugitive from justice because he supports the continued use of Qin as a front for major, illegal drug trafficking. Moreton and his Lady Macbeth-ish psychiatrist wife Lau Siyan (Gao Yuanyuan) want to take the company legit. If this sounds familiar that’s because Neon Night’s narrative skin has been draped over a by-the-numbers crime drama skeleton, one about brothers – blood or otherwise – on opposite side of the law (every John Woo movie ever), a family syndicate trying to shake a dark past (The Godfather) and the corrupt systems they must manipulate to achieve their ends (pick up, literally, any Don Winslow novel). Note that Neon Night takes place in lawless 1994, when neon signs still lined the streets and the cops were all crooked and raging gun battles in Causeway Bay were par for the course, which is the standout set piece the film starts with.
To that end the corrupt systems are represented by narcotics detective Wong Chi-tat (Lau Ching-wan), who just wants to stash enough money away to leave the filthy city with his asthmatic daughter, and his supervisor Tik Man-kit (Tony Leung Ka-fai), a cops/Qin intermediary who may or may not be as rotten as Wong for similarly personal reasons. Drug dealers, maybe the force itself, killed his wife so he might be out to stick it to someone? Hard to tell. Tik is as enigmatic as everyone else in his carefully posed stoicism, and whenever Mak flirts with giving us more about a character the focus turns away from them, leaving plot gaps that are more frustrating than they are ambiguous.
That is the barest of bones of Sons of the Neon Night’s sprawling, impervious narrative, which is simultaneously too much and not enough; yet more rumours suggest there are six additional hours of material on a hard drive somewhere. If that’s the case the original script was too long for a single movie. Elsewhere there’s Moreton’s hired muscle, Ching Man-sing (Louis Koo Tin-lok) and his (maybe) protégé Yip (Jiang Peiyao), in a E-plot whose engaging nugget about found family and self-determination is underserved. It’s left on the sidelines in favour of Ching’s workaday nihilism (why is he like this?) and the trap closing in around Wong (a wild guess). Mak desperately needed to kill his darlings and choose one story, one throughline, and flesh it out instead of keeping them all, no matter how much we may like Louis Koo. Mak does manage a tactile atmosphere of grime and degradation both physical and personal, that dual cinematographers Richard Bluck (Black Sheep, What We Do in the Shadows, lots of Avatar stuff) and Sion Michel (Wing Shya’s Hot Summer Days), Walled In art director Ambrose Chow Sai-hung (with Mak pitching in on production design) and the utterly stacked cast does its level best to breathe life into. The overflowing cast includes Michelle Wai Si-nga, Carl Ng Ka-lung, Richie Jen Xian-qi, Danny Summer, Nina Paw Hei-ching, Lo Hoi-pang and a pile of others in small (maybe substantial once) roles making Neon Night a solid board for a “Spot the Star” drinking game. The heaving crew also counts William Chang Suk-ping and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto on the roster. Mak didn’t half-ass it.
Is Neon Night worthless? Far from it, and if we’re all honest for a hot minute it’s exactly what we all expected it to be: A super stylish, indulgent, baffling thriller that doesn’t quite usurp the rules of the thriller game as much as it might like to. It’s also not as philosophically deep as Mak and co-writer Chou Man-yu (Dust to Dust, Behind the Shadows) think it is. Lest we forget it’s hard to make a bad movie at the best of times, and in that light Mak joins hundreds, if not thousands, of other filmmakers on the “Woops, that didn’t go my way” pile.