Steadily maintaining its detached attitude, the movie firmly sticks to these kids’ focused viewpoint while seldom looking outside. Their parents are virtually non-existent in the film, and the same thing can be said about most of those adult figures in their school. As long as they seem to be doing well on the surface, nobody particularly interferes with these kids. That's the main reason why they can get away with many misdeeds of theirs.
As announced to us from the start, the story becomes more disturbing during its eventual third act, where Ben and his accomplices face the devastating consequences of their latest criminal action. During that gut-wrenching moment, cinematographer Patrice Lucien Cochet’s camera swiftly swirls around the center to accentuate their panic and disorientation. The resulting dramatic impact is palpable, to say the least.
The film continues to hold our attention via its considerable style and verisimilitude, and the overall result is all the more remarkable considering how the production budget was no more than $250,000. Lin and his production team really tried hard to secure that small production budget, and their production could have actually been aborted at one point if it had not been for MC Hammer, who liked Lin’s script enough to hand over $10,000 to Lin without any hesitation. As far as I can see, the movie does not feel old or shabby at all even though it was made almost 20 years ago, and I guess Lin and his crew members used their budget quite efficiently without wasting any of it.
Lin also stuck to his vision to the end, especially in case of the characters and the performers to play them. According to a New York Times interview in February 2016, there was a potential investor willing to provide one million dollars for the production, but Lin said no because that potential investor demanded that white performers should be cast instead of Asian ones. He was right in his decision. The racial background of the main characters in the film is indeed crucial in making its story specific and distinctive, and the movie consequently becomes an interesting slice of Asian-American life, in addition to working well as a cautionary adolescent crime tale.
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