The Art of War
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Warner Village (Birkenhead Conway Park)
Released in the UK by Warner Bros on December 1, 2000; certificate 18; 117
minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Christian Duguay; produced
by Nicolas Clermont.
Written by Simon Davis Barry, Wayne Beach; from a story by
Wayne Beach.
Photographed by Pierre Gill; edited by Michael
Arcand.
CAST.....
Wesley Snipes..... Neil Shaw
Anne Archer..... Elanor Hooks
Maury Chaykin..... Capella
Marie Matiko..... Julia Fang
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa..... David Chan
Michael Biehn..... Bly
Donald Sutherland..... U.S. Secretary General Douglas Thomas
James Hong..... Ambassador Wu
"The Art of War" may well be Wesley
Snipes's "Stoker Ace" -- the movie that yanks him from superstar status and
throws him into straight-to-video career hell. It's a badly dubbed, cheap-looking
load of action trash photographed in odd angles and supplied with a meaningless
title. A far cry from "Jungle Fever" and "White Men Can't Jump" -- even a
far cry from "Money Train".
The plot is some nonsense about the United Nations
running sinister covert operations to get information to raise the organisation's
level of power and media profile. Snipes plays Neil Shaw, one of its secret
agents, whose missions are so inconspicuous that in the opening minutes of
the film he blackmails one of the most powerful businessmen in Japan on a
stadium screen during a televised event, before engaging in a rooftop gunfight
and parachuting off a big city building, on New Year's Eve, in front of the
world's press.
Essentially, the movie involves Snipes wandering
into situations that invariably break into spectacular violence, in which
he forgets all common sense and lets every object at hand turn into an unfairly
incriminating piece of evidence against him. The last act reveals that his
bosses -- played by, believe it or not, Anne Archer and Donald Sutherland
-- have been working against him, which is a relief, because for most of
the film I couldn't tell if he was being chased by or running errands for
them.
No matter, I suppose -- the purpose of the film
is to show us a lot of gunfights. But there's certain stillness to everything,
being so shoddily made an' all, and the screenplay is so ludicrous it seems
to be undermining itself on purpose. Look at the scene in which Snipes wanders
into a dead girl's apartment, and pieces together exactly what happened simply
by looking at the architectural layout. This isn't deduction; it's
ESP.
Much of "The Art of War" is so ridiculous it's
plain funny. At one point Snipes is parked outside a café, glances
over at a plastic bag, somehow discerns it's a bomb, backs up his car, smashes
it into the coffee shop, grabs the bomb, throws it into the car, gets back
in, reverses the car out onto the street, runs out, and lets the explosion
occur. Wouldn't it have been just a tad less messy to run in, grab the bomb
and throw it into the road? And here's my favourite snatch of dialogue,
emblematic of the movie's intelligence level:
"Bob's your uncle!"
"Who's Bob?"
"He's your uncle!"
Uh, huh.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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