KISS OF THE DRAGON Directed by Chris Nahon With Let Li, Bridget Fonda Jean Cocteau R 98 min.
Jet Li has played bad guys, and he has played good guys, and it isn't easy to tell the difference. Kiss of the Dragon begins with supercop Liu Jian (Li) arriving in France from Beijing to work with the French cops in busting a Chinese heroin ring.
Is this your first visit to Paris? asks the customs officer.
It is. And a good thing, too. Everywhere he goes devastation tags along like a pet Biblical plague. He doesn t seem to ask for trouble, but trouble doesn't wait to be asked. If Paris should be unlucky enough to host Kiss of the Dragon 2, there won t be a building or a body left standing, no tourists to insult and no Parisians to insult them.
There s not much plot to Dragon, and no suspense. That wouldn't be so bad nobody goes to a martial arts movie for plot or suspense but there's nothing much in the way of character or cleverness either. The sound is harsh, the music is strident, and the direction is inept. Worst of all, there's no soul. Li takes on all comers, singly, in pairs, by the dozens, with the same cold efficiency. He scarcely ever breaks a sweat, and never changes expression. Chop, wham, crunch, pop, slam! and off he goes, unsmiling, unwrinkled, and unconcerned.
Director Chris Nahon and his mentor, producer/screenwriter Luc Besson, seem to have understood the basic soullessness of their product, so they inserted a soulful character in the form of a whore with a heart of gold. Jessica (Bridget Fonda) is a nice girl from North Dakota who has somehow wound up in Paris, had a daughter out of wedlock, got hooked on drugs, and got her daughter kidnapped by the villainous Inspector Richard (Tcheky Karyo) of the Paris police. Now he's forcing her to work the streets to get her little girl back. This whoring is clearly against her will, but sometimes she seems better adjusted to it than others. The first time we see her she is so nauseated at the prospect of servicing a Chinese drug lord in a luxury hotel room along with another hooker that she flees to the bathroom and escapes the ensuing massacre by throwing up. Later on, though, she's more than willing to repay Li for his gift of a couple of bags of shrimp chips with the only coin she has at her disposal.
We meet Inspector Richard (this movie is shot in France with French people, but everybody speaks English, and the inspector isn t even Ree-shar , he s just plain Richard) in the act of pounding a helpless man to death with his fists in a hotel kitchen, so we are left with no doubts as to his badness. We quickly see where this badness is headed he plans to frame the Chinese cop for a few of his brutal killings, but Li escapes with a computer disc containing visual evidence of Richard s guilt. Boy, is he mad!
For the rest of the movie Richard has the entire Paris police force out after Li. The cops spend most of their time annihilating everything in sight with automatic weapons, Hong Kong movie style. Hotels, bridges, cars, bateaux mouches, sewers, shops, and police headquarters are reduced to powder. There s more broken glass than you'd find at a Russian New Year's Eve party. They do show a little restraint with the gunfire when they get the drop on Li at a girl s orphanage, which I thought showed a nice touch of delicacy. Li fights back with hands, feet, the occasional firearm, and a wrist band of little acupuncture needles that he uses expertly for good or ill and never for more ill than in the forbidden Kiss of the Dragon.
Li moves through it all with the look of a jaded Puritan minister, black-clad and joyless. His martial arts moves are phenomenal, but without a story or a sense of style to give them purpose they lose their power to entertain.
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