Dance of the Dragon
This movie is great. For a drinking game.
Every time Korean heart-throb Jang Hyuk looks bewildered or MediaCorp actress Fann Wong looks pained, take a swig and you’ll be happily oblivious in no time.
The plot, for want of a better word, has Jang playing a poor Korean factory worker, Tae, who has always dreamed of dancing. One day, out of the blue, he receives a letter for a last-chance audition at a Singapore dance school.
Come again? This is such a random development that no one even attempts to give an explanation for it.
His transition from rural Korea to ostensibly modern-day Singapore is also made as jarring as possible as the language of the movie suddenly lurches from Korean to English.
The school that accepts international students is a rinky-dink set-up which is located, along with much of the action, in a time-warp section of Chinatown. Any moment now a rickshaw could trundle by and you would not be surprised.
The audition is a joke. Jang looks bewildered and Fann, as dance teacher Emi,looks pained. Glug glug.
To add to the fun, Emi has a psycho creep of a boyfriend, which partly accounts for her constant state of anguish.
Boyfriend Cheng (Jason Scott Lee) challenges Tae to a duel as he does not like the fact that Tae is dancing with his girl.
Tae points out, not unreasonably, that he’s a dancer, not a fighter. But he gamely picks up some form of Shaolin martial arts from a DVD, and then proceeds to what can only be described as a pose-off with Cheng.
And then there’s the finale, a dance competition which Tae and Emi take part in, even though they don’t ever seem to practise together.
Where would Tae find the time given that he’s busy washing cars to make ends meet and otherwise preoccupied with the letdown of a showdown?
If this film, co-directed by Australians John Radel and Max Mannix, were a turkey served at Christmas, the leftovers would last till Easter.
All right, maybe that’s quite a stretch, but hey, you’re already drunk.
(ST)