Born to Be King (2000)

Wonderful character development!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The stage changes to Japan where Chicken (Jordan Chan) marries a Japanese Yakuza boss' daughter.The story is rather same ol, same ol. There's senseless fighting between the gangs, and a traitor within the clan. It's rather a pat formula for this series. The movie is oriented for the juvenile audience who's looking for the cool in these movies, so I guess the story is designed to meet these expectations.But one thing I can say about this series is that it was gritty compared to other comedic happy Hong Kong movies of the '90s. In this respect, it was singularly unique.All the movies in this series has a disorganized look to it. I'm not sure why this is, but Ekin Chen and Jordan Chan and few others were the only characters that had discipline in their acting. In this movie, the acting style of Jordan Chan, Sonny Chiba, Anya, and Roy Chueng didn't match at all. I also wish that Sandra Ng would stop spoiling the mood of every movie she stars in. Her character was totally unnecessary.So more of the same, but there was closure (or was there ?) to the story, and the series ends with a not so interesting of an ending.

Love, romance, action, thriller, surprise ending, history of triads and China/Taiwan/Japan/Hong Kong relations, politics, betrayal, and the good guys/bad guys win in the end (happy ending). So, how could it turn out so boring? Whatever your interest, there was too much of the other stuff and too little of whatever your interest might be.Maybe it was how poorly woven all the elements were? Maybe it was the not so surprising ending? Maybe you need to have seen the first five episodes in this series? Maybe you should skip this one! For aspiring filmmakers/cinematographers this could be a valuable lesson in why the KISS principle should be applied to cinema.

While I have not seen earlier films in the Young and Dangerous series, I did find the plot easy to follow and reasonably engrossing, despite some rather awful cinematography. Jordan Chan carries the movie with a remarkable performance. Sonny Chiba plays his customary gangster role to perfection. Other characters are two dimensional. Ekin Cheng looks sullen and pretty; how does he see with all that hair in front of his eyes? Shu Qi pouts and looks beautiful, and plays an airhead so well that one wonders whether she is acting. Indeed, her efforts at crying look suspiciously like laughing. All in all, "Born to be King" is a quite a decent B movie, if one ignores the smarmy bits about Asian brotherhood.

Having never seen another "Young and Dangerous" movie, watching part 6 in isolation is rather like viewing a single episode of a long-running soap-opera, in which you have no idea who the characters are or what their backgrounds might be.The film is surprisingly talky, with lots of double-dealing and back-stabbing, and the odd action set-piece to spice things up. The sub-plot concerns Chicken's attempts at communicating with his new Japanese wife (the highlights of the film, very funny). The moral of the tale seems to be "why can't we (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Japan) just get along?". Overall, its all rather baffling to an outsider, and I would definitely recommend watching the previous films in the series first.