The Last Tycoon
Wong Jing
The story: Cheng Daqi (played by Huang Xiaoming and the older version by Chow Yun Fat) rises to the top of the underworld in freewheeling and turbulent Shanghai in the early 1900s. As the Japanese threat looms in the late 1930s, he has to figure out a way to survive and keep his first love Ye Zhiqiu (played by Joyce Feng and Yolanda Yuan) safe.

Hong Kong director Wong Jing’s recent output has run the gamut from appalling – Treasure Hunt (2011) – to enjoyably rambunctious – Treasure Inn (2011).
The big-budget epic-wannabe The Last Tycoon falls somewhere between the two.
Cheng Daqi’s rise to power is sketched out in a few key scenes, including an all-out street fight with knives and hooks and poles. Huang Xiaoming cuts an appealing figure as the raffish ruffian amid the action, which Wong helms with some flair.
Cheng, it is established, is a mobster with morals – he does not touch gambling and prostitution. What is less clear is how he then makes money.
Another big action sequence that Wong pulls off spectacularly is a Japanese bomb raid of Shanghai.
Unfortunately, the scenario is undercut by singer Joanna Wang crooning Waiting All My Life as Wong chooses to stage a dramatic run-in between Cheng (now played by Chow Yun Fat), his first love Zhiqiu (now played by Yolanda Yuan) and her husband.
That is the bigger problem with The Last Tycoon summed up in one scene: It cannot decide whether it wants to be an action drama or a grand romance and the film cannot convincingly marry the two genres.
The movie might well have worked as a stand- alone action drama.
Apart from the action sequences, Chow gets to show his dramatic chops in a banquet speech that has him skilfully navigating between his mobster backer Hong Shouting (Sammo Hung) and the wily military man Mao Zai (Francis Ng).
The romance, in contrast, is iffy.
It does not help that Chow and Yuan do not generate enough sparks together, which makes some of the dilemmas he faces feel less urgent than they should be.
Worse, Wong is such a literal film-maker we keep getting flashbacks to an early rooftop scene between Cheng (then played by Huang) and Zhiqiu (then played by Feng).
Nor does having two actors each playing those two key roles seem entirely necessary as it breaks the emotional bond between the audience and those characters.
The ending hinges upon the staging of a Chinese opera and there is some satisfaction in the payoff, even if it does remind one that Tsui Hark had used a similar plot turn to far greater effect way back in 1986 with Peking Opera Blues.
(ST)