It’s hard to sell yourself as a nerd when you’re as handsome as Takeshi Kaneshiro, but he manages it, and delivers the most entertaining performance in “Dragon.”
Kaneshiro plays Xu Bai-jiu, an investigator in 1917 rural China, who’s been dispatched to unravel the all-out brawl that occurs shortly after the credits. Somehow, two terrifying thugs wind up dead at the hands of a simple papermaker named Liu Jin-xi (played by renowned action star Donnie Yen).
The sequence in which Xu determines that Liu’s ability to dispatch criminals was anything but luck is marvelous, like having Sherlock Holmes give a guided tour of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
From there, the movie hurtles along at a pitch of sentiment and melodrama that would make MGM blush, and it’s mostly very diverting. The plot and fight scenes conjure everything from “Sweeney Todd” to “A History of Violence.”
There’s a smidge too much back story, and director Peter Ho-sun Chan has a habit of throwing up extravagant shots without a lot of connective tissue, so at times the feel is closer to a graphic novel than a moving picture.
It’s never dull though, and the familiar characters and stock motivations are convincingly put across. And there’s always Xu, who’s turned to acupuncture to suppress his empathy, as you wait for the inevitable moment when suppressing it won’t be enough.