|
 BETTER
LUCK TOMORROW- 2003. Drama.
99 minutes. Color.
Rated R. With money and smarts comes power, and in this film by
Justin Lin, that’s exactly what this group of Asian-American high school
students find out – and then come to abuse. A group of four
over-achievers, while scheming to get into the best colleges, go from
making some extra cash off of cheat-sheets and pilfering computer stores
to dealing drugs, and other more heady crimes.
Greed nudges them further down the path of destruction, which
eventually leads to murder.
In the first half of the film, Lin does a great
job of illustrating the interactions of the four main characters played by
Parry Shen, Jason J. Tobin, Sung Kang, and Roger
Fan. Despite the mysterious
beginning where a body is discovered buried in a back yard, the
introduction of the characters is carefree and humorous.
As the film progresses and the characters and situations evolve and
darken, viewers remain just as absorbed though the mood severely shifts
from lighthearted to intense.
My only issues with the film are the liberties
taken regarding just what rich teenagers can get away with.
Other than a couple of mentions here and there, there are seemingly
no parents anywhere in this community that the teens have to deal with.
Conveniently, all of the parents in question are either out of town
or simply not acknowledged what so ever.
Also, pockets full of money or not, I have a hard time buying the
scene in the Las Vegas casino where all four of the main characters are
gambling – two of which couldn’t pass for legal if their lives
depended on it. The location chosen to hide the body is also a little
questionable. For four kids
as intelligent as these, burying the body in a friend’s back yard just
beneath freshly laid sod just doesn’t seem like the best route to go
when everything else they’d done up until then was so methodically
plotted and performed. One would think that at least the character that was
planning on majoring in biology in college would consider the inevitable
“smell” factor.
An overall enjoyable film that offers both laughs
and gasps - provided you can ignore the occasional stretch of reality or
practicality. -Melanie Falina
|
