Better Luck Tomorrow

REVIEW
The warm sunbathed faces of the Asian-American boys that open Better Luck Tomorrow are both a delight and a jolt. Delightful because they are new fresh faces on the screen that, even in the midst of a diverse 21st Century, Hollywood usually ignores or marginalizes. Jolting for many of the same reasons. Writer/director Lin takes the characters one step further and paints them as bad boys, quite unchartered territory, indeed. In a dalliance with the stereotypes of Asian-Americans as an intelligent bookish breed, the lead in Better Luck Tomorrow is just so, yet with a bit of a dark side. Shen stars as Ben, a handsome high school senior whose friends get him involved in some heavy duty drug-related extracurricular activities. The boys stick together, becoming one of the schools biggest drug suppliers and all around menaces. It’s an intriguing story that bounces back and forth between comedy and pitch black comedy to downright Tarantino-esque disturbances while trying to maintain a clear head about it. An attractive cast, an energetic screenplay and a skewed analysis of what it truly means to be successful, Better Luck Tomorrow leaves a lot to contemplate. Yet it does occasionally suffer from tone problems, creating a few situations that seem a bit too chaotic for a film that works best within its subtitles.