Year of the Dragon

Cimino's heroes have always been insufferably self-righteous, and Captain Stanley White (Rourke) is no exception. Standing alone, in the teeth of public opinion and police distrust, he conducts a clean-up campaign on New York's Chinatown which amounts to declared warfare (appropriate, since he is NYPD's most decorated veteran). His feud is conducted with such savage relentlessness and disregard for procedural nicety that he finds himself fighting his own police force, his wife, and his girlfriend as much as the local tong. Once again Cimino's ability to handle furious action set pieces is well to the fore: a shootout in a Chinese restaurant and a battle with two pistol-packing Chinese punkettes put him in the Peckinpah class. The connecting material, however, is by turns muddled, crass and dull, amounting mostly to Stanley's interminable self-justification. His anger directed at any yellow skin, and his inability to distinguish between Asiatic races, mark him down as a racist. Whether this applies, by extension, to Cimino and the film as a whole, is a moot point. CPea.