Despite the exotic locations and a largely non-Anglo cast, CHINA WHITE suffers from a meandering, derivative meatball of a script and yet another twitchy, tic-ridden, bad-guy performance from Billy Drago.
Scalia (Billy Drago) is a Mafia kingpin trying to muscle the lucrative heroin-peddling business in Amsterdam away from all competitors, principally Chinese brothers Russell Wong and Steven Vincent Leigh. Scalia's strategy is not to confront the brothers directly, but to prod local gangs into
waging war against them so he can eventually move in and scoop up the spoils. The fun starts when a rival Vietnamese gang kills the brothers' uncle, the Amsterdam Chinatown godfather, and attacks the brothers' stronghold, causing them to flrrthe city. Scalia cuts the Vietnamese out of his business
for allowing the brothers to live. That makes the Vietnamese easy pickings once the brothers' rest up and return, with a convenient stash of cash and weapons retrieved from a hideout in the picturesque Dutch countryside.
Faced with a cutoff of their heroin supply by Scalia, Wong travels to Thailand to negotiate personally with a rebel leader in the heart of the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle," trading medical supplies and armaments for a resumption of supplies. Back in Amsterdam, the brothers pay off local
rival gangs to stay out of the way so they can fight Scalia without interference. Along the way, Wong becomes involved with pretty gambling-hall dealer Lisa Schrage. Amazing for a smart drug kingpin, Wong has no idea that Schrage is also working undercover for Interpol to get the goods on Scalia.
Equally amazing for a smart undercover cop, Schrage has no inkling that Wong is one of the city's top heroin dealers. Not much happens until Scalia arranges a final battle to intercept the first of the brother's new shipments. Both brothers are killed in the ensuing hail of bullets and Interpol
fumbles the bust on Scalia, allowing him to go free. He is killed on the courthouse steps by one of the brothers' relatives, who is in turn allowed to go free by Schrage, who intercepts him in the parking lot.
Perhaps most amazing of all, an end title notes that CHINA WHITE is based on the Schrage character's own story and that she actually bore a baby from Wong's character. Since CHINA WHITE is basically a guy's action flick, she has little to do with the main action, so the end title is a startling
revelation coming at the end of a routine plot with far too few revelations of any kind. Instead of telling the far more interesting story of Schrage's character, the filmmakers seem to have been intent on recycling YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985) from an Asian point of view. That would seem downright
silly considering the mediocrity of the source except when the general hostility of the Asian community to Cimino's film is taken into consideration.
Even by that standard, however, CHINA WHITE is a snooze, doing little beyond remounting essentially the same story minus Mickey Rourke's maverick cop, and not doing it very well. Ironically, the brothers are treated as the heroes of the piece despite supplying slow suicide to the citizens of
Holland. Schrage's character, and her Interpol cohorts, are largely peripheral to the main action and inept when they are involved. Perverse for an action film, there is, in fact, not that much real action to be had here. The scenario has an annoying tendency to wander away from the main plot,
with such digressions as Wong's trip to Thailand, which is picturesque but has little to do with anything, and Wong's intermittent romancing of Schrage, which includes a romantic weekend in Paris for no particular reason except to drop in a few shots of the Eiffel Tower.
Topped off by Drago's flamboyantly awful performance and unimpressive performances by the rest of the cast, what it all adds up to is yet another boring, mediocre, direct-to-video B-movie on what appears to have been a wishful A-movie budget. (Violence, substance abuse, profanity, adult
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