In the middle of a busy Hong Kong intersection, as snow falls on the streets, two gunmen unleash a barrage of gunfire on an unsuspecting crowd. Before the night is through, a hospital will be bombed and the scion of a pharmaceutical fortune will be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in the rubble. In the aftermath of this attack, a drug war breaks out that soaks the streets of the city in blood and cocaine.
Sons of the Neon Night is a hyper-stylized crime saga about the heir of this pharmaceutical empire, Moreton Li (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who is pushing the company to go clean and get out of the drug trade while his brother Maddox (Alex To) continues to operate in the shadows. Swept up in this battle are various forces – undercover police officers, dirty cops, a lone wolf cleaner, Moreton’s vicious wife – and they all take part in the bloodshed that director Juno Mak displays on an epic scale.
Sons Of The Neon Night Is A Sprawling Story That Loses The Plot
Although the set-up is quite simple, Sons of the Neon Night proves too expansive for its own good. As more faces come into play, the narrative is told in fits and starts, losing the cohesiveness necessary for this kind of story. People appear before disappearing for long stretches of the film and a simple power struggle loses tension when one half of the party remains mostly unseen through the film.
Sons of the Neon Night mostly ends up being a collection of scenes in between exchanges of bullets and fists, with Mak shooting his anarchic version of Hong Kong like a demented Gotham City, but with no real heroes lurking in the shadows. I’m not of the position that a film needs to have a likable protagonist to have empathetic characters, but there’s no one to truly root for in Sons of the Neon Night because we don’t sit with any of these characters long enough to really feel for them.
The closest we get is the corrupt police officer hoping to escape Hong Kong with his young daughter, but even this feels too emotionally slight to resonate. Instead, Mak, in his second feature, focuses on the striking imagery at play in the film. There’s a severity to the way he shoots the city, all dirty concrete and pure white snow.
It’s hard not to imagine that his past as a music artist may have influenced Sons of the Neon Night, almost as if he’s looking at the film through the lens of a music video.
One scene in particular, when we first meet Moreton in the opening moments of the film, feels outside of reality and, when he walks through a doorway, it’s almost as if he’s entering the world of the film, steeling himself for the bloodshed to come. Other images – of blood on snow, a view of the city from above, the isolated location of a shootout – are all part of one visually spectacular whole.
Mak knows how to build tension, using precise editing and light camera work to keep things engaging. It’s hard not to imagine that his past as a music artist may have influenced Sons of the Neon Night, almost as if he’s looking at the film through the lens of a music video. But, as an ode to crime films of the past, Sons of the Neon Night works on too few levels to reach the heights of its lofty ambitions.
Sons of the Neon Night premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the midnight section.
