“Dragon Tiger Gate” Poster
Director: Wilson Yip
Cast: Donnie Yen, Nicholas Tse, Shawn Yue, Dong Jie, Li Xiaoran, Yu Kang, Chen Kuan-tai, Yuen Wah, Wong Yuk-long, Sheren Tang, Xing Yu
Running Time: 94 min.
By Z Ravas
I hadn’t seen Dragon Tiger Gate since it was new on DVD in 2007. It was released on disc in the States by Tai Seng, by the way, just in case you want a reminder of how long ago ’07 was—yes, before distributors like Well Go USA and 88Films got into the game, Tai Seng was more or less the only label for Hong Kong films in North America, and their releases often left much to be desired in terms of their picture quality. I remember I didn’t care for Dragon Tiger Gate when I first saw it—I think in a post-SPL world, the film’s reliance on wire work felt like a bit of a step back as far as Donnie Yen’s action design was concerned…
…or maybe it was the hair? I mean, just look at that cover art. They got a 43 year-old Donnie Yen wearing the wig from Little Nicky in this MFer!
After recently revisiting SPL recently, I was curious to return to Dragon Tiger Gate and see if I had perhaps been unfair to it in the past. What I will say is, this is the most bizarrely front-loaded action movie that I think I’ve ever seen. By that I mean: arguably the two best action sequences in the entire film occur within the first ten to fifteen minutes. If you see a fight scene from Dragon Tiger Gate clipped on Twitter, it’s almost guaranteed to be the sequence with Nicholas Tse kicking black-garbed gangsters around a lavish two-story restaurant…which is the first fight scene in the movie. We get a second restaurant fight almost immediately after this (which was reminding me of City of Violence, also from 2006)…and then from there Dragon Tiger Gate becomes bogged down in melodrama, multiple flashbacks, and CG-assisted training montages for almost the remainder of its runtime.
The front-loaded nature of Dragon Tiger Gate proves a truly baffling creative decision, particularly when that first act is fairly effective at presenting director Wilson Yip’s version of a live-action comic book, falling somewhere between the super-powered unreality of contemporary Andrew Lau movies like Storm Riders and Avenging Fist and the over-the-top kinetics that were soon to come with Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle the following year. Allow me a very millennial reference point: with the hair, the costumes, the Blade Runner-esque cityscapes, Dragon Tiger Gate almost feels like if Full Moon Pictures’ Charles Band had produced a live-action adaptation of some story-driven beat-em-up from the PS2 era, like Squaresoft’s The Bouncer. Even the soundtrack from acclaimed Japanese composer Kenji Kawai (Ghost in the Shell, Ringu) was reminding me of the music from JRPGs that I’ve played.
All of this is very much my vibe, but Dragon Tiger Gate soon becomes overburdened with forlorn looks and repeated flashbacks to the characters’ childhoods (this is the only action movie I can recall where every character has known each other since they were little kids!) that I found myself growing restless over the course of its modest runtime. It’s like if a movie had the look and feel of something like Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World but took itself as seriously as a heart attack. How can a film in which Shawn Yue plays a guy who’s obsessed with nunchucks and wears a silver wig from Spirit Halloween be so…tortured and poe-faced?
There’s also the inescapable fact that Dragon Tiger Gate is yet another Donnie Yen vanity piece. Okay, Donnie kind of earns it here by choreographing some pretty spectacular action setpieces at times (Yen is credited as sole Action Director), but I also find it hysterical that the film devotes so much screentime to Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue honing their skills before the big climax…only for the two of them to get their asses kicked by the Big Bad and need to be bailed out by Donnie, who comes charging onto the scene like the Kool-Aid Man. If you thought there was any chance Donnie was going to let these kids upstage him, you’d be sorely mistaken.
Dragon Tiger Gate is maybe what happens when a terribly silly movie tries to carry itself with a little too much gravitas. A version of this same story with better pacing for the action, a not so overwrought tone, and a less OP Donnie Yen could have made for a much more balanced and fun comic book movie. As is, Dragon Tiger Gate is certainly worth a watch for hardcore Yen fans and that one really cool scene at the start where Nicholas Tse gets to throw kicks all around a fancy restaurant, but these days I tend to think of this movie as a curio among director Wilson Yip’s collaborations with Donnie Yen, one that’s book-ended by much superior efforts like SPL and Flash Point.
Z Ravas’ Rating: 6.5/10
Its defintely a silly movie but i would rate it higher simply because its only one of 3 Yen/Wilson Yip collabs that isnt an Ip Man movie, a franchise thats been milked so dry, that its turned into milk powder. And seeing prime Yen waviung his arms around with a wind machine constantly blowing his hair like he’s in a Head and Shoulders commercial….its awesome. And on release it looked like Nic Tse was gonna take up the mantle from the old generation in terms of star power – and he has to a degree but hes also more commonly known as Cecila Cheung’s ex husband/absentee father