Snakehead

Dai Mah and Sister Tse talk

Brilliant individual moments don’t always combine to make a brilliant movie. Snakehead is a case in point. A New York crime drama with Taxi Driver levels of ambition, it’s slickly made and very well acted but just doesn’t cohere as a drama. It’s a true story, or so it says, about a young Taiwanese woman (Shuya Chang) smuggled into the USA by a snakehead (people smuggler). The journey costs her $57,000, an impossible amount to pay off, but she sets about trying to clear the debt by working her way up the criminal network run by Dai Mah (Jade Wu), Chinatown big wheel and crime queenpin. Mah has fingers in many pies and … Read more