RACIAL PROFILING
THE ART OF WAR
Directed by Christian Duguay
Screenplay by Wayne Beach and Simon Davis Barry
With Wesley Snipes, Marie Matiko
(THEATER) R 117min
The Art of War is a movie that asks the question " How do you give a medal to someone who doesn't exist for something that didn't happen?" Specifically, it is Donald Sutherland who asks the question. Sutherland is the Secretary General of the UN, a post that this movie suggests is vaguely pathetic and faintly comical. He is speaking to the UN's head of covert operations, Anne Archer, to whom he sometimes plaintively suggests that maybe the UN shouldn't be doing this sort of thing. They are speaking of Wesley Snipes, the UN action hero who is under such deep cover that no one can acknowledge his existence. How anyone can break the amount of glass Wesley breaks and stay under deep cover is a matter of mystery. This is a man who will not go through the front door of a building if he can rappel down its face or crash through a skylight. When he does go through the front door, as he does at a diner, it's apt to be in a car. He has, quite literally, a chip on his shoulder.
This is neither as good a movie as you might hope, nor as bad as you might fear. There are some rousing action sequences, with Snipes showing off dazzling martial arts moves. He spends so much time leaping off high places he should get frequent flyer miles. There are flurries of clever dialogue. But it's a movie that gets lost in its elements, a movie that bogs down in a welter of plot and incident and action, a movie that ultimately fails because it is all trees and no forest. As the villain says, "You, like most people, fail to look at the big picture."
It's a movie built on racial profiling, a movie that believes that if you have one good Chinese you can make all the rest of them bad and you've covered your bases. You almost expect poor Wen Ho Lee to pop out of a closet waving some hard disks. Our good Chinese is Marie Matiko, who is Snipes's love interest, and who has something encrusted on her nose that you're relieved to discover is a diamond. There's no chemistry between them, but the movie comes up with a way of getting her naked that may catch on. Fleeing the scene of another explosion in a stolen car, Snipes tells her to get undressed. "Take all your clothes off," he orders. "How do you think they knew where we were? They've got you bugged!" What's a girl to do?
"The Art of War" is an ancient military text by Sun Tsu, who believed in winning by destroying the enemy from within. This movie is a step in that direction.
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