The Last Tycoon (5/10)

Am I the only one who is bored of Wong Jing's direction? He used to be awesome back in the 90's but I just don't see his work being brought forward well into the 21st century. Sure his work doesn't suck but I just feel he's ruining movies with great potential.

And please someone stop Chinese movies from getting dubbed. It's the 21st century and they are still doing it! Use one dialect and stick to it!

To start off with, this movie was confusing. In the beginning, it was confusing because I didn't realise that Chow Yun Fat and Huang Xiaoming were playing the same character. Why? Because they have no resemblence to each other at all. 

Both actors were doing their own thing, and didn't pay any attention to what the other person was doing. Take Looper as the best example, where Joseph Gordon-Levitt studied Bruce Willis and then acted as the younger version of Willis. Also showing great respect to the movie icon. Such was not the case with Huang Xiaoming who bore no resemblence at all to Chow.

I blame this on Wong Jing, who made things even more confusing when some actors "grew into" other actors and others didn't. Oh the inconsistencies.

His storytelling also was just a thing of the past, creating drama for drama's sake and the individual shots bore no continuity to the previous one. This was most apparent with a lot of the explosion scenes in the movie. Plus chandeliers falling on their own made no sense at all!

However, I haven't seen Chow's badass self for a long time now and here he has gained a bit of that old glory back. Francis Ng also stole the scenes with a leering and sinister portrayal. Huang was the only one I thought that didn't fit in this movie.

With all the bad stuff out of the way, there were still some good found. The cinematography for one was beautiful. There was a good story hidden somewhere in all the mess and they shone when they did. The acting were mostly very competent. And some of the drama created were good too.