Down and Out in Chinatown

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON, a suspense-action film starring brat packer Mickey Rourke as a hard-nosed New York detective out to expose the crooked dealings of the Chinese mafia, marks Director Michael Cimino's wobbly return to the silver screen after his cinematic catastrophe of 1982, the much-heralded Heaven's Gate. In a vain attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of the viewing public, Cimino assumes the Herculean task of grafting together elements of the action-adventure, love-story, cops-and-robbers and suspense-thriller genres. The final result is nothing more than an unintelligible mass of celluloid which might be more aptly titled Raiders of the Lost Opium Den or Godfather III-The Chinese Syndrome.

In a nutshell, the storyline focuses on Detective Sargeant Stanley White (Rourke), a Vietnam Vet-turned policeman propelled by a Ramboesque obsession with the American military failure in Southeast Asia and a steely determination to flush out the undesirable element from what he regards as a cesspool of Sino-American corruption--New York City's Chinatown.

Prowling about his new beat with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, white is the quintessential Yuppie-come-lately supercop, complete with a Beginner's Guide to Chinese Culture and Civilization to help him ride out the bumps. In no time flat, White conveniently manages to stumble on an international drug ring masterminded by the reigning Chinese Godfather, Joey Tai. White immediately jumps into action, tracking the drug king's every move with various illicit listening devices and tailing him via a Chinese rookie cop whom White has inserted as a mole in Tai's operation. What follows is a more than predictable series of cat-and-mouse games between White and Tai, climaxing in a surprisingly uneventful and rather boring shoot-'em-out at the New York City Port Authority.

While Cimino has introduced a potentially interesting subject--the existence of a Chinese Mafia organized along the lines of ancient clan triads--he complicates The Year of the Dragon by inserting superfluous storylines that detract from the film's central theme. In addition to being superfluous, most of these supplementary plotlines are poorly written and even more poorly acted. In one particularly forgetable scene between White and his R.N. wife, she chews him out for forgetting to come home early and make love during her ovulation period; according to her, he's "missed target practice."

While some have charged that the film portrays Chinese-Americans unfavorably, The Year of the Dragon is no more discriminatory to Chinese-Americans than was The Godfather to Italian-Americans. Although Cimino occasionally goes overboard with the Tai group's criminal image--dressing them all in white suits with black ties is a bit excessive--he scrupulously places certain Chinese-American characters in positions of trust and importance--a chief example is White's successful TV anchorwoman-girlfriend, for example.

But ethnic issues aside, The Year of the Dragon is one to leap right by.