‘Sons Of The Neon Night’ review: With no expense spared, Juno Mak constructs an alternate 1990s Hong Kong

Dir: Juno Mak. Hong Kong. 2025. 129mins

Conflicting morality, ambitions and methods are at the heart of Sons Of The Neon Night, the long-awaited 1990s-set second feature from Hong Kong actor-director Juno Mak. Brothers on opposite sides of the drug trade become locked in an increasingly ruthless power struggle when the chairman of a family-run pharmaceutical company is murdered. One is heir to the empire trying to go clean, the other is happy to maintain the company’s status as a legal and illegal drug peddler. Hampered by choppy pacing and storytelling that crosses the boundary between cryptic and confusing, this admittedly lushly constructed quasi-epic is rendered nigh-on impenetrable, though not unwatchable.

Mak has reinterpreted the Hong Kong crime thriller 

Making its world premiere at a Cannes midnight screening, Mak’s wildly-ambitious follow-up to his 2013 Golden Horse FIPRESCI winner Rigor Mortis has attained near mythic status in Hong Kong for its 10-year production period (it was impacted by Covid-19 delays) and one of the biggest budgets in Hong Kong cinema history, rumoured to be HK$400m (approximately US$51m). Sons Of The Neon Night should generate interest from other festivals, genre events in particular, and the film as it stands could also attract niche theatrical distributors. Whether or not it gets the same bump as Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In enjoyed from the same Cannes slot last year remains to be seen but Sons, for all its narrative messiness, would be better served on the big screen – at least visually.

The overstuffed story begins in an alternate, lawless Hong Kong of 1994, with Q-IN pharmaceutical heir Moreton Li (Takeshi Kaneshiro, last seen on screens eight years ago) visiting his ailing father in hospital. Across town in Causeway Bay district (actually a scale recreation in Shenzhen) a pair of anonymous bandits go on a shooting rampage. Caught in the middle is an ambulance that quickly becomes a target: there’s a medicine shortage in the city, which is smack in the middle of a radiation zone and ravaged by fallout, or snow.

After an undercover cop (played by Mak) turns suicide bomber and blows up the hospital housing Q-IN’s chairman, Moreton kicksoff  his plan to remake the company’s legacy and go clean. Helping or hindering this goal to varying degrees are dirty narcotics cop Wong Chi-tat (Lau Ching-wan), shady veteran detective Ti Man-kit (Tony Leung Ka-fai), ‘cleaner’ for hire Ching Man-sing (Louis Koo), Moreton’s Lady Macbeth-ish wife Lau Siyan (Gao Yuanyuan) and his fugitive elder brother Maddox (Alex To). That is the tip of an enormous iceberg.

For all of Mak’s references to ’The Art Of War’ (the Chinese title of this film is lifted from Sun Tzu’s text), Sons Of The Neon Night is, on a fundamental level, a classic brotherhood crime drama (think Hard Boiled) with shades of The Godfather 2, Heat, RoboCop and action video games tossed in for good measure. Working with co-writer Chou Man-yu (Dust To Dust), Mak has reinterpreted the Hong Kong crime thriller the way he did the hopping vampire film in Rigor Mortis, and effectively deploys that film’s desaturated palette and post-apocalyptic industrial chic production design.

There’s a suitably disconcerting, out-of-time tone that supports the film’s solid worldbuilding, and Mak’s eye for exploiting Hong Kong’s singular spaces for maximum visual heft remains sharp. The opening shot of Moreton in bed in one of the city’s many tunnels is eye-catching, as is the notion of a snowy Causeway Bay and, perhaps, the most stylish funeral ever put on film. But action director Tang Sui-wa’s work is perfunctory at best, which may not be out of line for Mak’s more philosophical aims – but cerebral pre-handover actioners like Trivisa and Where The Wind Blows managed to do both.

If it feels as though a lot is missing from Sons Of The Neon Night, it’s because there probably is; it has been suggested the film’s first cut clocked in at nearly seven hours. The absence of so much emotional and narrative connective tissue means the viewer must put a great deal of effort into figuring out who the players are, and why they are dropping in and out of the story. This means it’s difficult to fully immerse oneself into this otherworldy Hong Kong, and also relegates the performances by the starry cast to afterthoughts. Ultimately Sons Of The Neon Night is a curious film; it would be an excellent mini-series.