At The Movies: Star-studded HK crime thriller Sons Of The Neon Night is a gorgeous mess

Sons Of The Neon Night (NC16)

132 minutes, opens on Oct 9
★★☆☆☆

The story: In a reimagined Hong Kong blanketed by snow, the violent death of the head of a venerable family-run firm triggers a showdown between the police and the corporation, which acts as a front for a drug ring. Youngest son Moreton (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is the interim leader after his father’s murder, but he hopes to rid his family of its shameful legacy. Wong Chi Tat (Sean Lau) is a cop looking into crimes involving the company. Ti Man Kit (Tony Leung Ka Fai) is a police psychologist assisting investigations, while Ching Man Sing (Louis Koo) is a hitman with a code of honour.

In this sprawling crime drama, the fantasy of the John Wick film franchise (2014 to 2023) collides with the grim aesthetics of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 to 2012).

It is visually lush and packed with Asian legends – among them Kaneshiro, Leung, Koo and Lau – but fumbles badly at building a coherent story that feels connected to the world in which it is set.

Hong Kong writer-director Juno Mak’s ambition cannot be faulted, but his execution can be.

Man Sing, for example, lives in a world ruled by a brotherly code of conduct – just because they are assigned to kill one another the next day does not rule out a hearty fraternal get-together the night before.

What does this have to do with the main story? Not much, but it will take a while for the viewer to figure this out, crippling the flow of a story riddled with blind alleys and character-building moments that turn out to be dream sequences or moments that allude to Hong Kong’s involvement in the Opium Wars of the 19th century.

This grandly staged, expensive-looking production feels very much like Mak’s version of Megalopolis (2024), a work by legendary American film-maker Francis Ford Coppola of similar scope and ambition but which turned out to be a mess.

Sons Of The Neon Night feels like a homage to the colour-desaturated movies of American director Zack Snyder (Man Of Steel, 2013), the morally grey world of the hard-boiled cop thriller and the sparse, metaphorical language of an art-house work – an impression reinforced by the way every character is framed by a halo of cigarette smoke.

The poetic, indirect language is maintained in the English subtitles. At times, it feels like Hong Kong’s crime scene has been overrun by literature graduates.

For an ensemble picture with a mystery at its centre – who is the connection between the patriarch’s assassination and acts of violence happening across Hong Kong? – the film is refreshingly light on exposition.

On the minus side, viewers have to keep their brains engaged or be baffled by the goings-on, as this reviewer was at several points in the movie.

Hot take: This ambitious but disjointed crime thriller would have been better served as a miniseries.