I disagree with most of the other reviewers. Dance of the Dragon is a terrible, terrible movie. It is all form and little substance, like one long beer commercial. Too much emphasis is given to making the movie look pretty. This indulgence would not have been so painful if the rest of the movie lived up to the cinematics and incessant, evocative score.
The lead characters are vacuous and 1-dimensional, spouting lines that could be written by teenagers for a bad school play. There is little to no screen chemistry between them, and the film editing makes it hard to believe some of them can even dance (my guess is they cannot).
Nothing about the movie seems grounded in anything meaningful, even clinically clean Singapore is crassly reinterpreted. The characters appear to have found a nook in modern Singapore caught in a 1930s time warp. One gaffe is the portrayal of a dingy public toilet, there is no such thing in Singapore!
It is unfortunate that the director provides such a cursory and unrealistic rendition of the film's location when there is so much more unspoken commentary to explore. If moss-stained walls and run down furnishing was the intended setting, then the film should have been set in true-to-life Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. Please reference Tsai Min- Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.
Perhaps the most unforgivable flaw of this film is its inability to evoke any excitement or deeper comprehension for the world of Dance. It could be argued that the film is about the pursuit of dreams, not about dance per se. All the best movies about dancing were also about the pursuit of dreams, and much much more (Flashdance, Strictly Ballroom, Saturday Night Fever, Billy Elliot). Even Kung-Fu Panda showed us more about kung-fu than this movie did with dance.
For a film with the word 'dance' in its title, the glaring omission of anything remotely informative about dance itself is a real shame. Again, form trumped substance, and where we could have passionate dialogue expounding the hidden philosophies of dance, instead we were treated to one Korean pretty boy flexing biceps in slow motion. The directors treatment of the film's driving point was much like his treatment of the film's location: cursory and superficial. I just don't see people signing up in droves for dance lessons after watching this film.
Ultimately this movie's undoing was in taking itself too seriously, its pretension only served to magnify all its obvious shortcomings. As far as pretty Asian cinema is concerned, far more capable directors have made far better films: Wong Kar Wai, Shunji Iwai, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang.
The lead characters are vacuous and 1-dimensional, spouting lines that could be written by teenagers for a bad school play. There is little to no screen chemistry between them, and the film editing makes it hard to believe some of them can even dance (my guess is they cannot).
Nothing about the movie seems grounded in anything meaningful, even clinically clean Singapore is crassly reinterpreted. The characters appear to have found a nook in modern Singapore caught in a 1930s time warp. One gaffe is the portrayal of a dingy public toilet, there is no such thing in Singapore!
It is unfortunate that the director provides such a cursory and unrealistic rendition of the film's location when there is so much more unspoken commentary to explore. If moss-stained walls and run down furnishing was the intended setting, then the film should have been set in true-to-life Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. Please reference Tsai Min- Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.
Perhaps the most unforgivable flaw of this film is its inability to evoke any excitement or deeper comprehension for the world of Dance. It could be argued that the film is about the pursuit of dreams, not about dance per se. All the best movies about dancing were also about the pursuit of dreams, and much much more (Flashdance, Strictly Ballroom, Saturday Night Fever, Billy Elliot). Even Kung-Fu Panda showed us more about kung-fu than this movie did with dance.
For a film with the word 'dance' in its title, the glaring omission of anything remotely informative about dance itself is a real shame. Again, form trumped substance, and where we could have passionate dialogue expounding the hidden philosophies of dance, instead we were treated to one Korean pretty boy flexing biceps in slow motion. The directors treatment of the film's driving point was much like his treatment of the film's location: cursory and superficial. I just don't see people signing up in droves for dance lessons after watching this film.
Ultimately this movie's undoing was in taking itself too seriously, its pretension only served to magnify all its obvious shortcomings. As far as pretty Asian cinema is concerned, far more capable directors have made far better films: Wong Kar Wai, Shunji Iwai, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang.