I consider Doze Niu to be something of an auteur among idol drama directors. The label is admittedly overgenerous, but if there's any idol drama director who's managed to take what seems like populist fluff and make it modern and meaningful, it would be Niu. Unlike Tsai Yueh Hsun who accomplished more by tackling bigger stories and settings, Niu stuck in the idol staple of romance. His Toast Boy's Kiss, Come To My Place, Say Yes Enterprise, and Wayward Kenting, however, are not your usual manga-based confections, but distinctive, disarming stories of love and loss that challenge the genre with details and deliberation, while also keeping the target audience in mind even during the detours. Niu manages that same balance of self-indulgent details and audience-centric appeal in his entertaining gangland picture Monga.

While Niu's self-referential first feature What On Earth Have I Done Wrong?! was an offbeat festival offering, he goes completely and fabulously commercial for his second film Monga. The coming-of-age gangster film set in 1980s Taipei was a huge box office hit in Taiwan, and it's easy to see why. Monga brings idol drama stars Mark Chao and Ethan Ruan to the big screen for hard knocks, fast times, flashy shirts, cheesy pop, and epic brotherhood melodrama that, much like the Hong Kong triad classic Young and Dangerous, drives in the message that the gangsta's life is only glorious if you don't sit to the end of the film.
 
In case the above description isn't already a give-away, Monga is not exactly an authentic discourse on Taiwan gangs. Mark Chao, Ethan Ruan, and Tom Cruise lookalike Rhydian Vaughan are far too handsome to be real gangsters (or real people, for that matter), and they rather glaringly speak in Mandarin instead of Taiwanese for most of the film. The casting of variety show funnymen Chen Han Dian and Huang Deng Hui is even more of a stretch for local audiences who are all too familiar with their comedic images. There's also this wonderful part in the film where the budding gangsters are taken up to the mountains for gangster boot camp where they learn how to master traditional weapons; I'm sure that happens in real life.
 
Monga is undoubtedly an idol drama take on a gangster movie, but it's a Doze Niu idol drama take on a gangster movie, and that makes a world of difference. His young cast might have never roughed and toughed through the swaggering eighties, but Niu has, and he embellishes the era and the experience with proud "taike" flair. Monga is teeming with life and local flavor most apparent in its namesake setting, the colorful Wanhua district with the temple at its center. The film captures a moment in time in its nostalgic recreation of a sleepless Monga filled with hustle and bustle, and competing gangs carving terrain from block to block. The young and confused upstart punks portrayed by Chao, Ruan, and company are part of that exhilarative time and place, as are the fiery yet fatherly boss brilliantly embodied by Ma Ju Lung and the Mainland mobster who speaks softly and carries a big stick, aptly played by Niu himself.

Niu supposedly brought his stars out to meet and mingle with actual gangsters so they would have a better idea of the world their characters occupy. As seen in Monga, that gangster's world is apparently one of violence, vanity, and vitality, of men in love and women in need, brutal bloodshed and innocence lost. Most harrowingly, it's also an unabashedly sentimental world in which the best of brothers can fall to the worst of betrayals, but at least everyone looks pretty in the process.