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The Farglory Hotel seen from the cable car at the Farglory Ocean Park.

While trying to fall asleep at the Farglory Hotel (adjacent to the Farglory Ocean Park) in Hualien, Taipei, we found Fierce People playing on the hotel’s movie channel.

Based on a novel by Dirk Wittenborn, Fierce People is one of those Gatsby-esque stories in which an impressionable young man becomes enamored of rich people and is inevitably, unpleasantly divested of his illusions. It’s directed by Griffin Dunne (the star of Scorsese’s After Hours), whose father Dominick Dunne wrote fascinating true crime stories involving rich people for Vanity Fair.

Fierce People stars Anton Yelchin, looking and sounding like an abandoned puppy (If you’ve seen him more recently, in the Fright Night remake and in the achingly real Like Crazy, you’ll notice he’s gotten handsome. He returns as Mr Chekov in the next Star Trek), is a teenager looking forward to summer in South America with the father he’s never met. His father, the “Elvis of anthropologists”, lives among the (fictional) Ishkanani tribe known as “Fierce People”. His vacation plans go kaput thanks to his mother Liz (the always excellent Diane Lane), who has substance abuse problems. She resolves to clean up and start over by accepting a long-standing offer from the billionaire Osborne (Donald Sutherland) to become his personal masseuse.

Chris Evans and Anton Yelchin in Fierce People

So mother and son move to the Osborne estate, where everyone assumes that Liz is the old man’s mistress and Finn is befriended by Osborne’s beautiful golden grandchildren Maya (Kimberly Stewart before she started acting deader than the undead) and Bryce (Chris Evans who is following us around—his telekinesis movie Push was playing on the bus. Chris, we adore you, but this is so wrong. Our 5-year-old niece loves you. Go away. Get back here. Go away. Come here).

The movie’s conceit, which the director hits us over the head with every five minutes, is that the tribe of rich people is as vicious and brutal as the Fierce People of South America. (Seen constantly in Finn’s father’s documentary, lest you forget who the Fierce People are. Those reels are played so often they should’ve burst into flame.) Something horrific happens to Finn—if he’d been Ishkanani, he would have to get payback by ripping out his enemy’s heart and displaying it to the village. Around this point Finn has a dream in which an Ishkanani shaman appears to him…speaking Tagalog (“Manggagaling sa puso mo…”)

Does this mean that the Ishkanani are not in the Amazon but in the much more ferocious jungles of Balic-Balic or Leveriza? And are these the same jungles where the Ewoks of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi live?

The movie is both overworked and undercooked (Wittenborn adapted his own novel for the screen) and it never really comes together, but it’s got such interesting actors—Lane, Sutherland, Stewart and Evans (We have to say we’ve never seen a bad Chris Evans performance, and no we’re not blinded). If you watch Fierce People, bear in mind that Captain America doesn’t really exist, but the evil rich do.

Speaking of Gatsby-esque…