PREMIERE.COM REVIEW (posted 4/11/03)

An Asian-American friend of mine doesn't date white guys because "they smell like bologna," and if you ask me, so do their movies. My friend is an actress, and she's fed up with auditioning for the same stock parts: hookers and concubines, martial-arts experts, and Viet Cong rebels. She can't wait to see Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow. Finally, an all-American movie by Asians, about Asians, for everybody. Like Allison Anders's Mi Vida Loca, the film gives outsiders a voice and introduces mainstream audiences to their perspective. But what's most impressive about this movie is how familiar, rather than how different, everything feels. Lin's Ivy League-bound Orange County teens aren't the only kids their age who can relate to being bored by academics, feeling insincere about their extracurriculars, and dabbling in vice merely to distract themselves.

It's surprising how closely Lin's portrait adheres to expectations, not those of Asian-Americans, but rather that of the teen-angst genre itself. The movie's cultural fingerprints are all but invisible as Lin shows the formation of a gang; the heartbreak as our hero, Ben (Parry Shen), crushes on the class cheerleader; and the defining (albeit entirely unnecessary) act of violence that shatters their world. The movie's most noticeable departure actually occurs in its voice-over narration. Whereas virtually every other tale of adolescent disenfranchisement features an aspiring writer in the lead role—from the roughneck novelist in The Outsiders to the street kid who rekindles Sean Connery's muse in Finding Forrester — Ben's ambitions begin and end with dreams of playing pro basketball. So why is he sharing this pastiche of details omitted from his college application essays? Because he's tired of all that phony Hollywood baloney and wants you to know that he and his Asian-American friends aren't so different from those white guys, after all (disregarding the corpse on their hands, of course).

—Peter Debruge