GANGSTER ROCK review

Chie Jen-Hao's Gangster Rock is a lovable mess, though more mess than lovable. It's essentially about people realising fame and fortune isn't everything as long as they're alive and have options, and while there are plenty of ways to film this sort of thing - from the stunning low-key fantasy drama of Studio 4C's Princess Arete to the laid-back coming-of-age vignettes that pepper Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema - you generally need a compelling cast of characters and at least a modicum of professionalism to pull it off. Gangster Rock has neither.

There are two stories here. One plotline follows Hau (Leon Jay Williams, Jump), a small-time gangster not long out of prison after a shakedown gone horribly wrong led to the death of his then girlfriend. The other stars (collectively) Gangster, a group of musicians working the underbelly of Taipei's club scene, where industry sharks insist the two lead vocalists would do better as teen idols performing saccharine ballads. A-Hai (Van Fan, Cape No. 7) just wants to carry on struggling to make it, but his friend Jack has pretty much had enough.

The band grow desperate, signing up to a shyster record label whose finances turn out to be rotten to the core. When the thugs who put up the funds move in to collect, Hau gets put in charge of the record company. He needs to make Gangster's first release a hit to clear his own debts, but the record exec who snapped up Jack is nursing a personal vendetta against the rest of the band.

It sounds promising, but Gangster Rock is scuppered by a tired, lazy script, clueless structure and some of the most bafflingly amateurish direction imaginable in something featuring a major local star. It's not entirely unambitious, and presumably more than a negligible amount of money went into the production, but very little of it seems to have ended up on screen.

Hau's opening flashback is confusingly edited, and much of his escape from police pursuit looks suspiciously like two cars circling a parking lot, occasionally plowing through some cardboard boxes for no apparent reason. This is a film where once Hau's old comrades in arms catch wind of his attempt to go straight, when they fight him in an underpass they repeatedly throw him into conveniently placed stacks of bottles, crates and suchlike which seem to have materialised out of nowhere the moment the cameraman's back was turned.

The cast try their best - Leon Jay Williams as Hau is almost unrecognisable compared to his bland supporting turn in Jump, and makes a surprisingly convincing tattooed thug. But the director (who also wrote the story) seems largely unable to give any of them something interesting to do, and when he does he promptly squanders it, leaving subplots untouched or unexplained for great stretches of the film or dropping them entirely.

The comedy is never genuinely funny or even energetic enough to raise much of a smile - we get a couple of half-hearted scenes with the bassist participating in medical trials, a case of mistaken identity and little else. The action is embarrassingly inept; Williams works up a good snarl, but the climax with Hau's enemies swarming him en masse is frustratingly tedious where it should be thrillingly physical.

And perhaps most damning of all, for a film supposedly about the thrill of climbing up on stage and living the dream with your closest friends the music simply isn't that good. The score fails to impress on any level, with none of the songs sticking in the viewer's memory once the credits are over and done with. The key performances are dubbed, and the disparity between earlier rehearsals and the overproduced number the band come out with for their final appearance is laughable.

Yet it comes so close. Gangster Rock's heart is definitely in the right place with the idea that maybe things won't work out just yet, but as long as you've got friends to support you it's not so bad, right? But it never once manages to push this past a simple platitude into anything deeper or more thought-provoking. Chie Jen-Hao clearly genuinely wants his audience to cheer up and revel in a flush of shared optimism, but his apparent lack of any notable talent - or so it would seem, on the strength of this film - kills his ambitions stone dead over and over again.

Young Taiwanese and Asiaphiles around the world could probably sit down quite happily with Gangster Rock playing in the background, but even then it's hard to imagine it winning them over to any great extent. Chie Jen-Hao's film means well, and it doesn't exactly warrant warning people off it, but it's hard to recommend it either.