[Originally published in The Weekly (Seattle), September 4, 1985]
Year of the Dragon is supposed to be one of those movies people either love or hate. The picture’s been out several weeks now and, while no one seems quite to love it, the hate vote has been pouring in. Spokespersons for the Asian American community have charged director Michael Cimino with grotesquely distorting life in New York’s Chinatown and fostering a sociopolitically retrograde, “Yellow Peril” image of Orientals, American and otherwise; last week, a $100 million class-action suit on behalf of Asian Americans was filed against Cimino, producer Dino de Laurentiis, and the distributor, MGM/UA. Cimino-baiters have restyled the multimillion-dollar production “Dragon’s Gate” in bloodthirsty reference to the director’s studio-busting 1981 misfire Heaven’s Gate. And viewers of every stripe have taken an intense dislike to the movie’s nominal hero, a brutal, obnoxious, foulmouthed, racist, sexist New York cop whose obsession with toppling the new “Godfather” of the Chinese mafia takes a murderous toll among his own intimates.
These reactions are easy to understand. Moreover, the film has a raft of flaws, some of them glaring, that decisively disqualify it as “a good movie.” The script (by Cimino and Oliver Stone) yammers and hammers away at its points rather than, for the most part, allowing them to emerge from the flow of the action with force and complexity. In structural terms, the scenario loses touch with several characters planted early on, then yanks them back out of limbo just in time to fulfill some hasty dramatic function in the closing reels.