Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 103
Fresh: 83 | Rotten: 20
A promising work by Lin, the energetic Better Luck Tomorrow is disturbing and thought-provoking.
Average Rating: 6.8/10
Critic Reviews: 38
Fresh: 29 | Rotten: 9
A promising work by Lin, the energetic Better Luck Tomorrow is disturbing and thought-provoking.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.7/5
User Ratings: 7,826
My Rating
Movie Info
A group of unlikely high school students take up crime as an extracurricular activity in this independent drama. Ben (Parry Shen) is a 16-year-old high school student who is the living embodiment of the stereotypical Asian overachiever. Ben obsessively studies even though he gets straight A's, takes part in a dizzying variety of school activities and community volunteer work, which he thinks will look good on his resume to colleges, and is even a member of the basketball team, even though he
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Cast
-
Parry Shen
Ben Manibag -
Jason Tobin
Virgil Hu -
Sung Kang
Han -
Roger Fan
Daric Loo -
John Cho
Steve Choe -
Karin Anna Cheung
Stephanie -
Jerry Mathers
Biology Teacher
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All Critics (103) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (86) | Rotten (20) | DVD (14)
Better Luck Tomorrow, a corrosive, insightful study of the pressure-packed lives of suburban high school students, brings a new variant to gangster movies: gangsters with perfect SAT scores.
Better Luck Tomorrow breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school.
A enerally absorbing look at a slice of society normally taken for granted, both in life and onscreen.
Spends more time avoiding Asian-American stereotypes than it does making sense of its characters and plot.
Top CriticMTV (which bought this movie out of Sundance) believes the target audience to be high school and college students. I would argue that it's anyone in search of a well-made, thought-provoking motion picture.
If this is what Lin can do for the Hollywood equivalent of pocket change, we can't wait to see what's possible when he has an actual budget at his disposal.
Original, innovative and edgy, Justin Lin succeeds in shocking audiences with a story that breaks the mold with a talented cast of Asian actors that show how much Hollywood is missing out on pure talent.
Intriguing but dramatically thin.
Incisive [and] cautionary.
The film is accompanied by a scant few special DVD features.
Has an optimistic outlook that uses pessimistic results in a manner fitting for a film of such solid morality.
Um filme do qual Martin Scorsese pode se orgulhar.
You could have replaced everyone in this movie with the cast of some lily-white show like Dawson's Creek and nobody would notice the difference.
Justin Lin’s biggest accomplishment is providing a stereotype-shattering insiders’ view of the angst and rage of a group of Asian teenagers ...
[I]f the story has some rough edges, well, it's a first film.
Better Luck Tomorrow doesn't exploit its characters. Lin and his actors never allow these characters to be nerds. As "gangsters," they're hardly Jackie Chan material.
Doesn't settle for easy thriller plot twists.
Looks good and sounds good (witness the beautiful "magic hour" sequence). Too bad the film isn't as politically subversive as it thinks it is (or should have been).
At times Lin's story slides into crime cliches, but whatever he lacks in plotting he makes up for in style and brute emotional force.
. . .its bolder themes and naked ambition heighten the sense of disappointment towards the film's end when it fails to deliver on its initial promise.
The picture's relative uniqueness is what intrigues and compels, marking Better Luck Tomorrow as important, if not ultimately entirely successful.
A powerful and unpredictable film.
Audience Reviews for Better Luck Tomorrow
The film takes us inside the Asian community, showing us a group of smart Asian high school kids who know the drill of grades = college = success, but are bored and not challenged by our current sad state of education.
The main charactor is slowly brought into a web of crime, first by getting paid for creating cheat sheets, and then later getting into larcenty and finally, as things escalate and the Asian "gang of four's" reputation grows, into narcotics.
At the center of the film is an Asian cheerleader who is dating Jon Cho (Sulu in the Trek remake). Cho, who disperses drugs and wisdom to the main charactor, for some reason (never fully explained) abhors all the high school melodrama, so coerces the main charactor into taking the cheerleader to a dance. It's obvious that the main charactor and the cheerleader have feelings for each other, and yet, again unexplained, the cheerleader seems somehow bound to Cho.
The plot ramps up and there's an interesting twist (which could have been presented better) and then a final resolution that leaves several plates still spinning (kind of like life).
Throughout the film there are several cinematic camera tricks, which hit the mark about half the time (and are annoying the other half), and overall the performances of the cast are good, though I thought that the cheerleader's portrayal was a bit uneven, perhaps due to the script that had her alternatevely playing hot and cold.
The film also includes a trip to Vegas, which, while I found amusing, I also felt was totally superflous to the plot and felt tacked on (as if "hey, we need another ten minutes of film time"). I also found the Vegas scenes with the four amigos at the gaming tables to be absurd - Only one of the four could possibly pass for 21, so the scene rang very false.
Yet, for the intelligent expose into teen life, and perhaps for a look behind the curtain at those 4.0 GPA Asians, this film was worth watching.
Super Reviewer
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Director Justin Lin has a master's command of the camera and the story he's telling. He also allows his actors to look like true movie stars, even though most of the audience may have never seem them before (except for John Cho). It just sucks that now, eight years after this movie's initial release, Lin has become a corporate tool making godawful Fast and Furious movies. The soul behind Better Luck Tomorrow is the soul of a true auteur.