Sons of the Neon Night looks amazing and has a really cool name. I couldn't tell you what happens in the film, and I doubt even the filmmakers can, either.

Originally announced in 2015, filmed in 2017, and now, finally, released in 2025, Sons of the Neon Night is a gorgeous mess that never makes enough sense to justify its excessive runtime. It's a music video played at half-speed to a tune that keeps constantly changing, often midway through a scene.

The setup, or at least one of the multiple setups within the film, involves a horrific terrorist attack during Christmas, where a group of gunmen mow down hundreds of civilians during rush hour. A special police force is dispatched to stop them, only for the death toll to rise as attack spreads into a local hospital.

It's a punishing and direct way to start a movie. Already, we're riddled with questions. Who did this? Why? What could be worth such carnage? Two hours later, I still couldn't give an answer to any of these questions. Sure, we're told something resembling answers, but all they do is raise more questions and concerns. Every revelation is a built on a foundation of incoherence.

The stacked cast, including Hong Kong movie veterans Louis Koo, Takeshi Kaneshiro, and Tony Leung Ka-fai, do what they can with the material. They look gorgeous and cool, posing against increasingly absurdly lit backdrops, but that's all. To call their characters paper thin would be lie, as I don't think paper thin enough has been invented yet to justify the comparison.

When the action picks up, it's clear that filmmaker Juno Mak, who writes and directs, has taken his Johnnie To films to heart. The violence is ultra-specific and brutal, yet it's more focused on looking cool in stills rather than being functional. Unlike John Woo, whose shootouts are always on the move and packed with details, Mak highlights the singular moments that occur between the trigger pulls. Those split-seconds where characters peer down the barrel of the gun or when the muzzle flare lights them just right.

Again, it looks cool. Especially when Mak goes to town on a repeating motif of droplets of blood coating falling snow in mid-air. But because it doesn't mean anything, it quickly becomes tiring. These are screensavers or loading screens to a game, not an actually coherent narrative.

In one fascinating moment halfway through the film, Mak discovers an inkling of a curiosity that holds promise. Two old friends share shark fin soup during the dead of winter. The cook knows something is up, so he asks his friend to give an honest opinion on the food. "It was always too salty", his friend replies. In an instant, the cook knows his time is up.

It's a simple enough scene, but so full of unspoken history and context that it proves the most interesting one in the entire film. Sadly, it goes nowhere, and within minutes we've lost the plot again. Yet it's clear that Mak knows how to craft intriguing mysteries and work with characters. For whatever reason, be that the hellish production time or endless post-production, Sons of the Neon Night loses these successes in an ocean of muddled posturing.

After the screening, I overheard someone mention the original cut for Sons of the Neon Night was closer to five hours. Another suggested this was intended as two films, before a rushed edit pushed it for the festival lineup.

Whatever the reason for its final shape, Sons of the Neon Night is in no way ready for release. It's a messy, unfinished chore that has no neither beginning nor end. Instead, it plays like three episodes midway through a second season of a series that nobody has seen yet.

The end result is so chaotic it pushes away even the most willing participant.