In an American cinema increasingly aware of the lowbrow, exploitative potential of ethnic stereotypes, writer/director Justin Lin’s “Better Luck Tomorrow” is a breath of fresh air.
His protagonists, four Asian-American high school students, do not simply contravene the idea of Asians as the “model minority,” they bloody its nose, take its wallet and light its chemistry book on fire.
Lin’s aptly conceived character arcs do well to undermine conventions both cinematic and social, but after he has made his point, his breath of fresh air regrettably begins to smell familiarly stale.
Parry Shen (“The New Guy”) plays Ben, an overachieving, straight-A student who is often flanked by his best friend, the Beavis-esque Virgil (Jason J. Tobin, “Beverly Hills Ninja”). As an escape from their daily lives of perpetual extracurricular activities and college-application anxieties, the two pull low-key retail scams with Virgil’s cousin Han (Sung Kang, “Pearl Harbor”).
Ben’s rationalizations are simple ? it just feels good to do something bad every once and a while. But after classmate Daric (Roger Fan, “Rush Hour”) joins the trio in other petty crimes, the boys go from cheat sheets and doobies to cocaine and Vegas prostitutes.
Ben finds it more and more difficult to juggle his pseudo-mafioso lifestyle and his other priorities, like pursuing perky cheerleader Stephanie (newcomer Karin Ann Cheung). And after an ill-fated encounter with her insouciant boyfriend Steve (John Cho, “American Pie 2”), the gang members disband to face their respectively inauspicious consequences.
Lin gets fine performances from his young cast, especially Shen, whose baby face communicates equal parts passivity and volatility. He makes for a sympathetic lead and is backed by nicely tempered comic relief from Tobin and uber-cool posturing from Kang.
Like Doug Liman in his super-stylized fable about teens gone awry, “Go,” Lin demonstrates a remarkable visual sense of storytelling. The film’s bravura centerpiece in a sparely lighted garage is accentuated by dizzying camera movement, creating the same utter confusion and anxiety for the audience as it does for its characters.
But like so many young directors living in Quentin Tarantino’s shadow, Lin’s style cannot make up for his story’s sputtering substitute of garish melodrama for compelling climax. When “Better Luck Tomorrow” hits the middle-act wall, he resorts to gratuitous violence that builds only to a frustratingly dubious denouement.
Ben, Virgil, Han and Daric begin by just getting off on being bad. But by the film’s last half hour they’ve each become so self-absorbed and inexplicably impulsive that they’re behavior can be better attributed to the pretentious nihilism of Bret Easton Ellis than the casually chic carnage of Tarantino or Chow Yun-Fat.
Luckily, this seems to be more of a story problem, and script snafus are always more easily fixable than directorial ineptitude. Lin is a filmmaker who will only get better and better as he finds the right platform for his style.
Rest assured he understands that although his film is an accomplished first solo effort, there’s always tomorrow.
Grade: B
