In some ways, making an intentionally bad movie is more daring than making a good movie. If you fail, you have failed at something others have done by accident. If you succeed, there are going to be plenty of people taking your movie's badness at face value (as Rodriguez and Tarantino learned with Grindhouse), and at some level, being intentionally bad can be a lot less satisfying than accidentally stumbling upon it (as Snakes on a Plane will tell you). Compounding this is the difficult balance between winkingly bad and truly bad. I general good rule for this is that you can never, ever be boring. It's one thing to go way over the top, like in any of Chuck Norris' movies. But if you attempt some form of emotional content and miss the mark, the bad movie suffers as bad as a good movie. Case in point, Tears of the Black Tiger proves this in its potent mastery of fight scenes and its flailing attempts at emotional context.
Granted, the emotional context is as over-the-top as the action scenes. But they're boring. They're slow and filled with rote dialogue. It's built around one of those Slumdog Millionaire-esque "boy meets girl, grows up to find girl as an adult" scenarios. Our protagonist Dum has a couple flashbacks to his youth as he saves a young girl, Rumpooey, from harrassment again and again. She loves him, but class separates them. Blah blah blah. The story is, I assume, intentionally cliched, but the scenes are too slow to make an impact. There is much weepy-eyed hugging and sadness at broken promises. The simple story, the love plot also weighs down the momentum badly, taking up so much time pouting and being sad. Dum's flat acting is helpful when the movie settles into Western bullshit, but when it has to carry actual complex emotions (like conflict), the scenes just seem like tedious monologues for Rumpooey. If there ever needed to be a case to show why Clint Eastwood-directed westerns are low on the intimate sweetness, this is a pretty good one. They clash with the gleeful "I'm getting away with this!" attitude of the action scenes, and it's always hard to trust the emotional subtext when the movie includes a gag where an officer forgets to pull the pin from a grenade.
Let it never be said that they don't go gore well in Asia, though. This movie's a take off of Westerns, so it's filled with gunfights. Ever see someone take a rocket launcher to a gunfight? Ever see someone get shot at the tip-top of his ten-gallon hat and bleed from it? How about a bullet ricochet off a dozen different objects in the room before nailing its target? These scenes are absolutely fantastic and inventive. The cliche-ridden dialogue works so well here, as it underscores the corniness of these Western conventions and the ham-fisted impossibility of every fight. Best of all, it doesn't talk down to westerns; it's as much an homage as parody. There's a clear love for the revisionist westerns from the 60s, and it bursts out of every frame when it's an action scene. In the moments like the bloody shootout between the police and outlaws, which includes the aforementioned rocket launchers, the movie is incredibly entertaining.
But these scenes are relatively (emphasis on relatively) few and far between, and their tone clashes with the romantic subplot. Similarly, the relationship between Dum and his sideman, Mahesuan, underlines how distant the actor playing Dum is when he's talking to his love interest. There's even a montage that gives the best Brokeback Mountain parodies a run for their money. I can't find a clip right now, but let's just say... lots of drinking and smiling at each other while spinning in a circle happens. Also, horseback riding side-by-side along a beautiful landscape. It's not inherently gay, but let's just say neither is pro wrestling. They just seem closer than Dum and Rumpooey (his love), but not in a way that makes it any more convincing when Mahesuan turns on Dum. Their final gunfight never plays on their relationship at all, either, which makes the montage seem more an aberration than anything.
But let's get back to those landscapes. The set and costume design for this movie are phenomenal. I'm reticent to say "cinematography" because a lot of it seemed blurry and dimly lit to me, to the point that my eyes were feeling a little strained, but that also might be the DVD transfer. Everywhere - from the verdent greens of the lake filled with lillypads to the Barbie-pink of Dum's university - there are shockingly gorgeous colors used. Everything is over-saturated, like Speed Racer. Everything looks cheap, too, though, so imagine Speed Racer being done on a soundstage rather than CGI. Some sets are specifically on a soundstage to be similar to older Thai films. The aesthetic pleasures of the mvoie alone are almost enough to make this a recommendation, but not completely.
That underscores why I am put off by the romantic subplot, too. It's standard for the fighting in westerns to be over a woman, but these scenes appear to attempt face-value emotions. Then everything around it, from the settings to other scenes, is over-the-top. There's even a little person dancing around in a cowboy outfit! There's no way that little person is meant to be anything but comedic in this movie, or he'd do more than dance in his cowboy outfit. Anyway, everything else about the movie strikes the right tone, so I do recommend it if you want to see the western (arguably the most American of film genre) reflected in Asian cinema. Hell, even the mock-Morricone (Mockorricone?) score is absolutely note-perfect. Actually, that might be the best thing about the movie, really. But it's also a definitive case study on why it is difficult to make an movie that knows it's bad. Compared to this, I'll defend Snakes on a Plane or Shoot 'Em Up any day. They at least treat themselves like bullshit the whole time.
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