Year of the Dragon

Year of the Dragon has an arrogant, electric energy that dares you to look away from the screen for an instant. Do so and you miss a furious piece of action that has bubbled up, seemingly out of nowhere. Read full review

Year of the Dragon is a first-rate cops vs. the mob melodrama which restores Michael Cimino's reputation as a gifted filmmaker. [2 Sept 1985]

Unquestionably, Cimino’s eye for detail and insistence thereon has paid off in his impressive recreation of Chinatown at producer Dino De Laurentiis’ studios in North Carolina. Crammed with an array of interesting characters, including the extras in the background, Dragon brims with authenticity. Read full review

Year of the Dragon leaves itself wide open to attack -- it has huge flaws and absurdities -- and Cimino is responsible for most of them. But this revved-up, over-stuffed movie is undeniably alive, teeming with evidence of Cimino's gifts as a filmmaker and his gaffes as a thinker. It's dazzling, and it's dumb. [19 Aug 1985, p.69]

It so often is a joy to look at and so often a pain to listen to. Read full review

The Year of the Dragon is full of florid language, saddled with Cimino's bogus insights and no more true to Chinatown than Heaven's Gate was to the prairie. But The Year of the Dragon is also robust and fast, violent and alive. There's an uneasy sense of the spurious about Cimino's art, but that's what he's making nonetheless. This is either a ya-hoo's delight or the best gangster fantasy since Once Upon a Time in America (long version); maybe it's both. [16 Aug 1985, p.D1]

Cimino's talent is at least 50 percent hot air, but the part that is not—his superb feel for movement across the Panavision frame—seems especially valuable. Say what you will about his overstuffed, overdetailed images, they at least represent a notion of cinema, as opposed to the flat television aesthetic that dominates Hollywood, that no film lover can afford to ignore. Read full review

Once again Cimino's ability to handle furious action set pieces is well to the fore: a shootout in a Chinese restaurant and a battle with two pistol-packing Chinese punkettes put him in the Peckinpah class. The connecting material, however, is by turns muddled, crass and dull, amounting mostly to Stanley's interminable self-justification. Read full review

Cimino's instincts are right -- the movie is outsized, and it needs baroque dialogue; you get the sense that he'd recognize the right dialogue if he heard it. But when he actually has to come up with it, the result is a series of outrageous hooters: "I've got scar tissue on my soul"; "I carried the cross with you, in Brooklyn and in Queens." Read full review

Its metaphors are too obvious (as before, Cimino's analogy for death is more death) and its treatment of social problems is skin-deep. Although the screenplay throws sops to many cultural and ethnic groups, it's riddled with racist and sexist attitudes. [23 Aug 1985, p.25]

Everything from the style to the casting feels grubby and worn. Read full review

In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn. Read full review

The movie is a form of hysterical, rabble-rousing pulp, yet it isn't involving; it doesn't have the propulsion of good pulp storytelling.

Director Michael Cimino turned YEAR OF THE DRAGON, an engrossing novel by Robert Daley, into a confused, overlong, preachy, and at times downright annoying crime epic with a wholly unsympathetic main character played by the totally miscast Mickey Rourke. Read full review