Ma jiang

Edward Yang made his only bad movie (and I've seen them all) with this flick about young gangsters in Taipei and the scams they run. All the foreign actors are god-awful and that includes poor Virginie Ledoyen when she has to speak English. Most of the humor and purposefully over-the-top acting falls flat. Among the cast, only the very talky Tang Tsung Sheng and the subdued Lawrence Ko stand out. None of the relationships among the characters ever really gets fleshed out, and the movie has an extremely conventional ending. Ledoyen is of course extremely gorgeous so maybe Yang was distracted because he never gets a handle on the tone of this thing.