Casino: Reviews

Like Danny Lee for cop movies, Simon Yam is perhaps the ultimate Hong Kong crime movie star. He looks the part -- suave but tough -- and his acting skills make even the sleaziest dai lo seem sympathetic, and he's certainly been in some of the classics of the genre. Unfortunately, Casino isn't one of them. It's a good Triad movie, but it's nothing you haven't seen many times over, both from the US and HK.

The plot (which is based on real events and was funded by gangsters, even though there's a big disclaimer at the end of the film) has Simon and his friend Alex Fong as two upstarts in the Macau gambling scene. They're tired of being small potatoes, and after enlisting the help of a dirty cop (Kent Cheng), they manage to topple their boss and seem poised to take over all of Macau until a new rival (Ben Ng) rears his head. As his power grows, Simon must also deal with his estranged wife and a deadly illness that threatens to take his friend's life.

Most of the story is told in flashback as Simon and his associates are being interviewed by a reporter played by Kenix Kwok. This results in overuse of the tired "talking into the camera" device, which really started to annoy me after a while. Besides that, the story is just old hat. Director "Bloody" Billy Tang (the guy behind such sleaze classics such as Red to Kill) tries to liven things up with lots of Triad battles, but there's nothing behind them. It's just violence for the sake of violence, and that's boring. Besides, it's not even that bloody -- I suspect the Category III rating came more for Triad references (it's a big no-no in HK movies to refer to specific gangsters or gangs) rather than brawls.

It's kind of a shame that Casino didn't turn out better than it did. The movie has a solid cast, a talented director, and a fairly large budget (especially in this day and age of straight-to-video quickies). But the script is totally by-the-numbers, and holds little interest for the viewer. This isn't a bad film by any means, but Hong Kong has certainly turned out many other crime movies which are more deserving of your time than this one.

This biopic of Macau gangster Broken Tooth was funded by the man himself. Apparently, he's a non-smoking, non-drinking philosophy-spouting man whose only vices are a twin passion for dancing and for singing the Once Upon a Time in China theme in karaoke nightclubs. As you can guess, this is a very silly movie, but an entertaining one. Simon Yam is incorrigible as Broken Tooth, who will do anything for his buddies (especially the one with the incurable lung disorder) but is a sworn enemy to his foes. His greatest sin is that he fails to visit his wife (Ada Choi) in the hospital after she gave birth to their son. (She leaves him, but we're hard pressed to notice, as she was barely in the film to begin with.) We follow the rise of our saintly gangster from a small potato to the leader of a faction hundreds strong. This is just as well, as the other faction is hundreds strong too, leading to many scenes of motorcades of hire cars and scooters with their hazard lights flashing on their way en masse to rough up the other guys' turf. The fighting is in the style of modern HK cinema, with not much martial arts but with a whole lot of baseball bats, crowbars, sledgehammers, and the odd garroting with a shower curtain. The framing device for all of this history is a spurious interview with a trendy HK reporter, who treats Broken Tooth as a sort of pop star, which you probably would if he was a real life Triad who was funding the production. That's the key to the film; much of the enjoyment comes from the outrageous and spurious blending of fact and fiction.

On its release, this film received immense publicity. Not only did alleged 14K triad boss Wan 'Broken tooth' Kuok-Koi put up the funding for this film about himself, but he was also arrested days before the premiere.

For some reason this movie got a Category III rating. I watched it and only remember seeing violence. And nothing worse than say Hard Boiled.