This Bloody Hong Kong Crime Movie Loses the full Despite Being A Visual Feast – ryan

In the middle of a busy hong kong intersection, as snow fells on the streets, two gunmen unleash a barrage of gunfire on an unSuspecting Crowd. Before the Night is Through, A Hospital Will Be Bombed and the Scion of a Pharmaceutical Fortune Will Be Dead in the Rubble. In the aftermath of this attack, a drugg war breaks out that soaks the streets of the city in Blood and Cocaine.

Sons of the Neon Night is a hyper-style crime saga about the heir of this pharmaceutical empire, Moretton li (takeeshi kaneshiro), who is flush the Company to go out and get trade while his Brother Maddox (alex to). Swept up in this battle are various forces – undercover Police Officers, Dirty Cops, A Lone Wolf Cleaner, MORETON’S Vicious Wife – and they all take part in the Bloodshed that Director juno on an epic scale.

Sons of the neon night is a sprawling story that the full loes

Although the set-up is quite simple, Sons of the Neon Night proves too expansive for it Own good. AS MORE FACES COME INTO PLAY, The Narrative is Told in Fits and Starts, Ling the Cohsiveness Nesssare for this Kind of Story. People Appear before Disappearing for Long Stretches of the Film and a Simple Power Struggle Tension One Half of the Party Remains Mostly Unseen Through the Film.

Sons of the Neon Night Mostly ends up being a collection of scens in the between exchanges of Bullets and Fists, with Mak Shooting His Anarchic Version of Hong Like a Demented Gotham City, but with no real heroes lurking in the shadows. I’m not of the position that a movie needs to have a likable protagonist to have empathetic characters, but there’s no one to truly root for in Sons of the Neon Night Because We don’t sit with any of these characters long enough to really feel for say.

The closest we get is the corrupt police officer hoping to escape hong kong with his daughter, but that feels this emotionally slight to resonate. Instead, mak, in his second feature, focuses on the stroke imagery at play in the film. There’s a severity to the way he shoots the City, All Dirty Concrete and Pure White Snow.

One Skene in Particular, we have first meet meeton in the opening moments of the film, Feels Outside of reality and, we walks through a doorway, it is an almost as if he’s the world of the film, Steeling for the Bloodshed to Come. Other Images – of Blood on Snow, A View of the City from Above, the isolated location of a shootout – are all part of one visually spectacular whole.

Mak Knows How to Build Tension, Using Precise Editing and Light Camera Work to Keep Things Engaging. IT’s hard not to imagine that his past as a music artist may have influenza Sons of the Neon NightAlmost as if he’s look at the film Through the lens of a music video. But, as an ode to crime of the past, Sons of the Neon Night Works on Too Few Levels to Reach the Heights of Its Lofty Ambitions.

Sons of the Neon Night Premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the Midnight Section.

Sons of the Neon Night

5/10

Release Date

May 16, 2025

Runtime

132 minutes

Directory

Juno mak

Wriers

Juno Mak, Chou Man-Yu