Twin Dragons

Apr 14, 1999 at 12:00 am

So, let’s see: Under what – ludicrous – circumstances might you go and see Twin Dragons?

1) You’re in Hong Kong during some Great Festival whose name you can’t pronounce and whose significance escapes you, but whose magnitude makes it impossible for you to find a hotel room, so you go to the first drive-in and stay the night.

2) You’re in Hong Kong, whining ’cause you’ve lost your luggage and your passport and the American embassy opens at 9 a.m. You have an "I’m vulnerable: kick me!" sign on your forehead, so a local punk offers you a ticket to Twin Dragons. He says you look a bit "loco," but he speaks Mandarin really fast and the whole thing’s lost on you. He pulls you closer and yells, "Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?" but you stare at him with this blank expression on your face and he lets you go.

3) You’re a masochist and you’ve seen some really bad movies in your life, but you’ve heard Twin Dragons is the worst of them all – sloppy editing, traumatic dubbing, action sequences choreographed by different people, different scenes shot by different directors – and you don’t wanna miss that.

4) You’re an ardent supporter of the Directors’ Guild of Hong Kong which – in need of office space – shot the film as a fund-raising project.

5) You’re a sincere student of porn and you’ve noticed that Twin Dragons employs a similar technique. In porn, everything that happens between the sex scenes takes a lot of time and is boring: People have a drink, take the elevator, drive 10 blocks, watch TV. Everybody shoots the breeze waiting for the – quite explicit – moment of copulation, since that’s why the movie was made in the first place. Same thing in Twin Dragons: What happens between the action sequences is irrelevant or downright stupid – like Chan trying to pose as a passionate concert pianist.

"Curiouser and curiouser," said Alice. If you’re going to spend money, go see something else, says the reviewer.

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