The Last Dragon

Every once in a while, there’s a movie that makes you say “cocaine is a hell of a drug”. The Last Dragon is one of those movies. It tries to juggle being a kung-fu movie, a romance, a comedy, and a coming-of-age tale, with some Saturday Night Fever-by-way-of-the-80’s thrown in, and it fumbles almost all of these, but in an amusing way. There’s also like half a dozen storylines going on, none of which feel fleshed out. I mean, one of the two the main antagonists is a short, portly talent agent trying to turn some no-talent Jersey girl into Cyndi Lauper on a regional 80’s version of American Bandstand-slash-MTV. The other looks like Busta Rhymes, wears a red ninja costume from the 90’s Mortal Kombat movies, and calls himself Sho’Nuff The Shogun Of Harlem. And there’s the host of the dance video show (“played by” Vanity, because we can’t legally call it acting, just like Dairy Queen isn’t legally ice cream), and so many extraneous characters, and the search for a Master who may live in a fortune cookie factory and is guarded by three Asian Americans whose dialogue feels like it was meant for a blaxploitation flick. This movie is a lot. It is extra as hell. The main thing that kinda keeps it from being too enjoyable is the lead. He is as boring as unflavored ice cream. All his lines are delivered in this staccato style where he over-enunciates every word, making him sound like a human imitating a speech synthesizer module from the 80’s. He has the charisma of ceiling tile, and all the chemistry with Vanity of a funeral director and a corpse. His wooden performance can be funny in small bursts, but he’s the centerpiece of the movie, and that hurts sometimes. Also, the movie is too damned long and stuffed with side plots. At about 10 minutes shy of two hours, you wonder who in their right mind thought this needed to be this long and this overflowing with plot that is, in large part, incoherent. It’s still fun to riff on. It’s cheesy bad, and it knows it. But it just doesn’t have the right guy to keep the energy moving.