Critics reviews

As an experiment in excess, Year of the Dragon is eye-popping: A shootout in a Chinese restaurant is obvious inspiration for some of Quentin Tarantino's later over-the-top choreographies and a Chinese-Japanese-American reporter's (Tracy Tzu, played by Ariane) apartment in DUMBO is so breathtaking that it's hard to pay attention to the characters in the foreground.

Cimino's depiction of city life is turbulent and vital yet hive-like; he brings the same obsessive fascination with detail to his re-creation of New York (which was actually done on a North Carolina backlot). The movie's swing and energy are dubious, offering a mere gloss of normalcy to the frustrations and injustices, the backroom deals and sub rosa violence of daily life.

Cimino wrote the script with Oliver Stone, and it's about as hysterical as that pairing would suggest: it's melodramatically plotted, with weak female characters and a philosophy of righteous violence that shades into borderline fascist-fantasy territory. And yet it's still compelling because Jimmy's refusal to listen to what anybody is telling him makes him into an analogue for Cimino, or maybe the idea of Michael Cimino after Heaven's Gate.

A troubling, engrossing mix of complete pulp and grandiose grandstanding about gang wars in New York's Chinatown and a Vietnam vet (Mickey Rourke) turned maverick cop's efforts to prove the existence of and then violently smash the Triads, one could hardly point to another film as ridiculously, vividly and offensively cartoonish or one as sublimely dedicated to reality in all its granular, effortful detailing of language, environment, underworlds, and profession.

It has to be seen as a (sometimes futile) exercise in style on this question of what's close and what's a long way away... What has to be seen is how Cimino tries everything before getting to the only confrontation which could tie up every loose end in the film. What has to be seen is the way Cimino builds up his scenes from big camera movements, within which there's a proliferation of actions which aren't simultaneous (as on TV), but parallel (as in the cinema).