Sons Of The Neon Night Review: Takeshi Kaneshiro, Lau Ching Wan, Louis Koo Fight It Out In Great-Looking But Empty Crime Saga

Sons Of The Neon Night  (NC16)

Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Lau Ching Wan, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Louis Koo, Gao Yuan Yuan

Directed by Juno Mak

This Hong Kong crime pic was made in 2018.

No kidding.

Could be that everyone involved in this unhappy, posey, indulgent morass hasn’t smiled since.

Man, you couldn’t find a more depressed, nihilistic, blithely homicidal bunch of big stars in search of deeper Johnnie To meaning that isn’t here. Even if you're a tunnel mole who can actually spot what the heck director/co-writer/self-absorbed world-builder Juno Mak (Rigor Mortis) is over-stuffing into the dark.

He creates a stylised, visually desaturated, totally unrelatable dystopian world of 1994 HK as a nocturnal crime-infested, snow-flaked (seriously?) Gotham City without Batman or any Sane Man.

Certainly, this looks great as an aesthetically striking labour of love. That unfortunately shows all the labour. Like a phoney artificial artifact trapped inside a snow globe.

In this bleak, baffling Sin City, drug gangs and cops fight it out, shooters wearing Scarecrow-style sack masks massacre folks freely, some guy blows up a high-rise hospital. Everybody — police, criminal, rich bastard — seems to be shadowy-sinister in wanting to kill everybody.

Takeshi Kaneshiro broods even more than usual as Moreton Li, second heir to an illegal drug empire who eliminates enemies to turn it legit as a pharmaceutical company. Very The Godfather old hat, right? His elder bro, the rightful successor, is a locked-up maniac.

Lau Ching Wan, as a corrupt narcotics cop, and Tony Leung Ka Fai, as his Confucian-confusion wise superior, are very troubled lawmen. As is Louis Koo, playing a hired gun, who near-drowns a female partner in a bathtub just to prove a point that nobody can be trusted.

All of which, amid the swirl of callous brutality and worn-out mugs, makes you ask exactly what the hell is the neo-noir purpose here?

Is bold director Mak re-inventing the HK crime thriller while forgetting to invent a HK Batman? Or is he taking a stab at one real-life all-powerful local tycoon named Li since the dominant Li family here treats “the country as a playground”?

Mak can’t seem to decide which of his big names to put the primary focus on. FYI, Koo’s amoral hitman is the most interesting.

Now, rumours naturally abound of more hours of footage that would've befitted a much better streaming mini-series.

Instead of this postcard-pretty, pointless, pretentious art exhibition of Hong Kong as a dead-cold crime pit we see right here. (2/5 stars)

Photos: Shaw Organisation