Kiss of the Dragon
**
Cinema
Releases - November 9, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Rated on a 4-star scale.
Certificate 18. 98 minutes. Directed by Chris Nahon. Written by Luc Besson,
Robert Mark Kamen; from a story by Jet Li. Starring Jet Li, Bridget Fonda,
Tcheky Karyo, Ric Young, Burt Kwouk.
Yawn, yet another crap American chop-socky flick.
I've seen too many of these movies -- it's not hard to predict that a 'surprise'
bullet will hit the hero's ally, leaving him alone on the run, but I can
sense the exact moment in the exact line when the bullet will strike. God
oh God, what am I doing with my life?
"Kiss of the Dragon" stars Jet Li
as a Chinese cop who goes to Paris to supervise an investigation of Asian
heroin smugglers. Not far into the movie, the Frenchman in charge of the
case, played by Tcheky Karyo, starts blasting holes into the suspects with
Li's gun; Li realises he's being framed for murder, and starts
running.
We soon learn that Karyo is a highly corrupt cop
who sells drugs, runs a prostitution ring, kidnaps children, and in his spare
time locks people to the radiator for torture sessions. I kept waiting for
the movie to reveal the motivation behind his conspiracy against the Chinese
police force, but no such luck. The explanation is that he's just a naughty,
naughty man, I guess.
"Kiss of the Dragon" spends most of its time
meandering, cutting between scenes of Li looking tense, Karyo going all psycho
and a hooker played by Bridget Fonda doing a lot of whimpering. Along the
way there are some accomplished but not altogether exciting scenes of martial
arts. The film's one great moment sees Li muscling his way through a police
station only to come across... uh-oh... a room filled to the brim with cops
in the middle of a karate class.
All in all, this is basically a TV movie. It looks
dark, grimy and cheap -- not as cheap as "The Art of War", but cheap enough.
The soundtrack assaults us with bizarre interruptions of Oriental 'ambient'
tunes and loud American funk, the editing never gets a flow going, and Li
is pretty disappointing too. He made a great villain in "Lethal Weapon 4",
but as the hero in "Romeo Must Die" he was stuck with embarrassing lines
and unrealistic kung-fu sequences, and as the hero in "Kiss of the Dragon"
he plays a character so devoid of personality that he never had a chance.
The screenplay gives him so little to say in the first half of the movie
that whenever he speaks a sentence of more than five words it is surprising
and unnerving. Li is a talented martial artist and has the face of a born
leading man, but if he ever wants to make a good Hollywood picture, he should
start looking for better scripts, and fast.
I'll wrap up by observing that the guys who made
this thing sure have sick minds. The film has some truly brutal scenes involving
the mistreatment of prostitutes, and they simply do not belong in as frivolous
a picture as this -- we see hookers injected with heroin against their will,
getting their noses broken and being thrown into puddles of urine, all for
the purpose of scenery. And the climax features one of the most atrociously
gruesome death scenes imaginable, whereby blood is made to flow up to and
explode out of the villain's head by way of creative acupuncture. Gotta admit,
though -- I ain't never seen that before.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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