Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: SONS OF THE NEON NIGHT [Cannes Film Festival 2025 - Cannes, France]
The aspect of high stakes action has to reflect in the idea of the characters in play to have strategy beyond the aspects of their possibilities. "Sons Of The Neon Night" [Midnight] has a lot of octane and coolness but the threads that tie it together are fairly loose. There are least 4 or 5 main characters but their interrelation is muddy at best. The film follows an aspect of a pharmaceutical corporation which has corruption and underlying criminal activities underneath its hood. In the meantime, chaos sometimes but not always takes place on the streets. However there is no context for the societal strife or its wide ranging possibilities and impacts. The opening melee with very little regard for human life doesn't show the reason though its actual bombast is technically insane. There is a beauty and a slickness to the whole affair but it is very superficial. It wants to be a mega budget 90s thriller but it doesn't feel mythic. It feels like every character is gunning for themselves but with no real accomplishment at all in the end.
The head of the corporation who is trying to go legit in an utterly corrupted station is in the process of mourning the death of his father who worked well with alot of the big cops in the city. The circumstances of his death are glossed. This head, the younger son, brings in a new energy but his reasoning for his darkness is less than warranted...if at all. One scene in a soup shop with an old capadre of his father who makes shark soup has some grand possibility to it. But there is no adequate reasoning in the aftershock of it where one gets the sense of what it meant. His girlfirned/business partner/psychologist is the real shark and we get the sense that she is playing the sides but her ultimate necessity never comes to play. We see she is pulling strings but to what end. Even one cop asks her if she wants to start it all over again.
On the other side is an assassin for hire who has many codes in play even with a young huntress whom he believes doesn't make the cut. He ultimately walks into a no win situation but the question is why? For honor? For a code? None of these makes sense. It simply must all come down to money which is the only aspect that is logical. However the reality doesn't vive with this concept. The ending does little to rectify that despite a great pre-fight and final push which does want to bring to mind John Woo. A certain rumor ran around that this was part of a much longer cut of a movie which could have been two parts or a series but was whittled down to a feature film at just over two hours. What you end up is a lot of sequences, some of which make sense but don't quite contribute to the larger whole. C+
By Tim Wassberg
