After he helped to destroy United Artists with the now legendary infamous HEAVEN'S GATE, Michael Cimino tried with several movies to mount a countback, with only YEAR OF THE DRAGON possibly being the only worthy contribution to cinema since GATE.
In 1990, Cimino re-teamed with DRAGON star Mickey Rourke(and shortly before Rourke's career meltdown would force him to both work in softcore features and, for a brief time, pro boxer, before his comeback in 2005 with SIN CITY) in this remake of the famous 1955 movie with Humphrey Bogart.
The first act is brilliantly executed, and it looks like while this movie wouldn't be a classic, it would be a solid worthy feature of the thriller genre, like Cimino's DRAGON was for cop pictures. Instead, the movie's 2nd and 3rd Acts subsequently lose the narrative momentum, and end up being much about nothing.
A pity since Rourke does his best to work out a Bogart-esque silent charisma role, and really, he does good. David Mansfield delivers a great score that is a retro-trip back to the film scores of the 1950s, full of trumphets, and not simply fucking music used to mix action footage, which most film scores now seem to only exist for.
As the movie went from being a ***1/2 to **1/2 in rapid freefall, we see Cimino trying his best to make use of such a basic script, from having a ball-breaking woman leading the FBI squad after Rourke, to having 360 degree cinematography angles, to even nicely-lighted smoke.
A shame that since GATE, Cimino was always a talented if problematic director, he's only directed 4 movies since 1980, the last being SUNCHASER (which from what I hear, is pretty lousy) in 1996. Interestingly, he's a board member of the Weinstein Company, along with doing consulting and script doctoring work for it.
