When Michael Cimino made "Year of the Dragon" he was no longer flavor of the month. Crowned King of the Hill with only his second feature, "The Deer Hunter", his star plummeted when his third film, "Heaven's Gate", became the biggest flop in Hollywood history, at least as far as the studios and the public were concerned, despite its being a masterpiece and one of the greatest of all American films. After its commercial failure it seemed like Cimino might never work again but you can't keep a good man down even if it did take five years before he got behind the camera again.
Co-written by Cimino and Oliver Stone from Robert Daley's novel, "Year of the Dragon" was a gangster epic, part Jimmy Cagney and part De Palma's "Scarface" set in Chinatown with Mickey Rourke as the potentially racist cop caught in the middle of a Triad gang war and John Lone as the Chinese drug lord he has to go up against. It's not a great film with thick-ear dialogue and mostly so-so performances, (though both Rourke and Lone are excellent), and it did little to redeem Cimino's sullied reputation but it's certainly very stylish and fast-moving with a number of first-rate set-pieces and was definitely undeserving of the five Razzie nominations it received.
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