Any film that’s been sitting on the shelf for seven years deserves to see the light of day, but Juno Mak’s “Sons of the Neon Night” — which wrapped filming in 2018 — could’ve used more time in the oven. It’s hard to say what’s strangest about the gloomy action flick: that it’s overwrought and convoluted to the point of confusion, or that it somehow manages to feel incomplete despite this.

Set in an alternate, snow-covered Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, the movie’s opening images speak to an intriguing setting that’s seldom explored. Moreton Li (Takeshi Kaneshiro), CEO and heir to a pharma conglomerate, wakes up in a lush bed in his sprawling penthouse carved from the remains of an enormous cross-harbor tunnel. It’s the kind of imaginative flourish that both raises questions about this world and immediately establishes character, but it’s...