Kiss of the Dragon

I am a Jet Li fan.  To that end, I have not missed an opportunity to see one of his films as they come out and I already have plans to see his upcoming movie where he plays multiple characters living in parallel universes.  Having said that, I will acknowledge that I find his films to be disappointing as often as not.

It isn't as though the bad ones are completely terrible, but they are flawed enough that you feel embarrassed for the people who made the film, be they writer, director, actor or (extra?).  It would seem that no one can escape the ignominy of being tainted by the poorer elements of the film.

I don't blame Jet for what is wrong with this movie.  He does what he does very well, and I don't even recall him doing things that are so impossible and so blatantly based on wire work (as we saw in Romeo Must Die) as to lose credibility.  The problem is with the rest of the film.  You would think it would be enough for Jet to simply go through his paces.  The measure of the film is unlikely to be taken from the script, or Jet's dialog and emotional range.  However, he alone could not sustain this movie for me.

The dialog that the Brigett Fonda character spewed was so inane that I found it intolerable.  I found myself hoping that something terrible would happen to her, quite early on in the film, to spare me the torture of further having to endure the character.  I do not dislike Ms. Fonda, in general.  I wonder if it didn't pain her to play this part.

Besides that, I felt the film was too over the top in some of its setups.  At one point, Jet takes out an entire police precinct, and I felt it had crossed the bounds of believability.  Even being in the right, there's no way he could do that and not be having to explain his actions for something like three months straight.  Instead, in the next scene, he's visiting a friend in the hospital.  Not likely.

I can take Jet's period pieces as well as films like Black Mask.  There, we're asked to swallow some big pills, in terms of his ability, but it is okay because he is either a timeless legend, or a science experiment gone wrong.  In this film, I had a difficult time accepting that he could survive the international incident that would have occurred.  Of the many elements I could have excepted, they would have been more palatable without the Fonda character.  

8-6-2001