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Ethan Mao

2005, Movie, NR, 86 mins

Ethan Mao: Review

ETHAN MAO
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Writer-director Quentin Lee's (SHOPPING FOR FANGS) ongoing mission to shatter Asian-American stereotypes spawned this tale of a tense Thanksgiving Day spent with a gay, Chinese-American teenager who holds his family hostage at gunpoint. Ethan Mao's (Jun Hee Lee) ordeal begins the day his beautiful and wicked stepmother, Sarah (Julia Nickson), finds a gay porn magazine in Ethan's bedroom and his father, Abe (Raymond Ma), expels him from their comfortable, upper-middle-class home. Ethan heads down to "the Strip," where he knows there's a market for good-looking young Asian men, and meets Remigio (Jerry Hernandez) a young hustler who makes extra cash by selling party drugs like ecstasy and cocaine. Ethan moves into Remigio's squalid hotel room and, out of gratitude, offers Remigio sex. Remigio declines, making it clear that he regards the lonely and guarded Ethan as something more than a casual trick. Ethan, however, is too emotionally bruised to reciprocate. Heartsick for the mother he lost when he was 12 and unable to sleep, Ethan begins dipping into Remigio's supply, but the coke and ecstasy only make his insomnia worse. That Thanksgiving, Ethan asks Remigio for a big favor: While Abe, Sarah, Ethan's younger brother, Noel (David Tran), and Sarah's bullying, college-age son, Josh (Kevin Kleinberg), are spending the day at a relative's house, Ethan wants Remigio to help him sneak into his old home and claim the cash he feels his father owes him for working in the family restaurant without pay. Ethan also wants his mother's diamond necklace, a trinket of no great value but enormous sentimental importance to him. Midway through the heist, however, the family returns unexpectedly and a violent confrontation ensues; when the dust settles, Ethan and Remigio have tied everyone to kitchen chairs. Abe tells Ethan he's welcome to the money, but he can't have the necklace; it's in a safe-deposit box and the banks are closed. Sarah promises to retrieve it first thing in the morning, but Ethan refuses to back down. Until he has his mother's necklace, no one is going anywhere. Lee successfully freshens his otherwise hackneyed immigrant-family drama with elements borrowed from such home-invasion hostage thrillers as THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955), but while Abe and Sarah are thoughtfully written characters, Ethan and Remigio are far more two-dimensional. Lee obviously wants to portray Ethan as something other than the dutiful No. 1 son, but Ethan isn't entirely convincing as a doped-up street hustler. Remigio, meanwhile, never develops into anything more than a symbol of lamblike innocence and puppylike devotion; it's hard to care much who gets out alive. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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