A look at the life of youth gangs on the streets of 1980's Taiwan, Doze Niu's Monga doesn't break the mold of the whole "young Triad" universe, encompassing many of the genre's tropes and stereotypes. Despite this, and being a bit overlong at two hours and twenty minutes, it's still a good entry in the filmic world of Asian gangsters.

The "monga" of the title is a rough district in Taipei, where a group of friends join together to form the "Five Princes". At first, the gang serves as a foil to hold back their school's many bullies, but the teens soon learn that their toughness can quickly move them up the ladder in the local underworld. Of course, nothing good can last forever, and soon the friends find themselves pitted against each other in a life-and-death struggle.

The Five Princes themselves are a group of the usual characters we tend to see in these types of films. For instance, the character the story is told through, Mosquito (Mark Chao), is the level-headed and sensitive one, the type that falls in love with a hooker (Ke Jia-Yan) instead of using her "services". The other friends fall into similar molds: there's the joker, the coward, the ladies' man, and the tough guy. Though the base ingredients for the characters might not amount to much, the actors build them into people you want to watch. Mostly this is accomplished through their naturalistic style, which refreshingly forgoes a lot of melodrama which tend to creep into these types of productions.

In this regard, a lot of credit had to go to Doze Niu, which is a testament to his work ethic, because not only was just a second-time director, he also helped to write the script, co-edited the footage, served as a producer, and even appears in the movie with a small role as Mosquito's stepfather. With the end results, one can tell all that work paid off. It's not concerned with flash or violence, just telling a story (even one that is well-worn) in an entertaining fashion. While it ultimately doesn't quite step up to the upper echelon of Asian gangster films, Monga perhaps marks the start of a very interesting directing career for Doze Niu.

RATING: 7