These days Justin Lin is best known for the Fast and Furious movies though he is also slated to take over the next iteration of the rebooted Star Trek franchise. But like everyone else, he had to start somewhere and Better Luck Tomorrow was his feature film debut. This one only has middling ratings on Rotten Tomatoes but Roger Ebert saw fit to award it four out of four stars and commented that it’s extremely rare to see a film focused on the experiences of Asian-Americans. That’s pretty much why I was interested in this film myself.

Ben and his friend Virgil are academic over-achievers at a high school in California who are intent on gaining acceptance to an Ivy League university. To maximize his chances, Ben even memorizes a new SAT-vocabulary word every night and joins in many of the school’s clubs including its basketball team and its academic decathlon team. But they also secretly indulges in pranks and petty crimes. When Daric befriends them after writing an article for the school paper on Ben being the token Asian on the basketball team, he pulls them towards more serious crimes like selling cheat-sheets for tests and dealing drugs. In the meantime, Ben develops a crush on Stephanie, his laboratory partner who is also of Asian descent. However he discovers that she already has a boyfriend, the good looking and rich Steve who has everything going for him with seemingly no effort on his part.

Even in this early effort, one can see that Lin is a technically proficient and creative director. He uses Ben’s word-memorization ritual as a device to neatly demarcate each phase of the film. He displays a good deal of insight into the lives of Asian-Americans, acknowledging that the excellent grades they are renowned for requires plenty of hard work but also revealing that it is all self-serving. I liked how the dialogue is peppered with plenty of Asian references, such as mocking a friend for being a Chow Yun-fat wannabe or playing with the stereotype that Asians students only go out because the library has closed. Some bits of dialogue are just plain good, such as when Steve awkwardly comments that this must be the Stephanie fan club knowing that the other guys all have crushes on her.

Unfortunately most of the screen time here isn’t focused on the Asian-American experience but on their acting out through crime. While this is exciting stuff, there’s nothing on this front that is particularly novel. I’m particularly disappointed that the film fails to properly convey any insight into their motivations. Why would they spend so much effort in preparing for what should by all rights be very high-powered and successful lives and then risk losing it all in doing crime? I get that at least some of it is due to the thrill factor but the risk-reward ratio just feels completely off for people who are supposedly very smart. But what really kills the film is that save for pointing out that Stephanie is adopted and that her parents are therefore white, it treats the characters as if they had no parents at all even though they are all supposedly high-schoolers who still live with their families. This removes much of the psychological complexity of the characters and leaves most of what makes them tick a mystery.

This is even more frustrating given that this film is loosely based on the real-life murder of a Chinese American student by other academically high-flying students. It shocked America at the time because no one could understand why students from upper-middle class families and excellent prospects would do such a crime. Apparently Lin doesn’t understand either as he fails to offer a answer though at least he succeeds in capturing the senselessness of their actions. Finally, I feel compelled to note that while the most famous character here is Han since he later appears in the Fast and Furious movies, his character has only a very minor role as a member of their gang and has no real development arc of his own. He also stands out as someone who looks far too old to be a high school student.

Overall I found this to be a film that is riddled with flaws but is still good enough to mark Lin as a director with plenty of potential. Unfortunately for the moment at least he seems too interested in making shovel-fuls of cash with franchise movies to make more serious film like this, for which I can hardly blame him.