Busting loose (7/27/01)
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Kiss Of The Dragon. [Chris Nahon, 2001. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, after a story by Jet Li.]
The phenomenal Jet Li here appears in the role of a Chinese agent sent to Paris to trace, you guessed it, a French connection for heroin; since, alas, this connection turns out to be the very police official to whom he reports [Tchéky Karyo doing his very best Gary Oldman], he finds himself in short order alone and abandoned in Paris, wrongfully accused of murder, and forced to fight his way out of town through a malign army of bent cops. Fortunately this doesn’t lie behind the more-than-human capacities of our hero, who manages also to rescue the kidnapped child of junkie hooker [but, shucks, she’s got a heart of tarnished gold] Bridget Fonda while knocking over a horde of Keystone tenpins — and, at carefully metered intervals, taking the measure of several more formidable products of the French schools of the martial arts — which, I am happy to report, have not lain idle, since, in compliance with that law of action movies which usually states that you have to find a villain large and formidable enough that he looks as though he could stand up to the hero [if Stallone in
Get Carter, e.g., then, e.g., Mickey Rourke], it is essential here to find somebody fast enough that it doesn’t look like Jet can hit him fifteen times while he’s trying to get his hands out of his pockets. [Else you end up with something like the lamentably bogus finale of
Lethal Weapon Four.] But remarkably they found some big fast athletic guys nearly good enough for Hong Kong, and the set-piece fights, accordingly [choreographed by the justly famous Corey Yuen] are very very good.
Though he is not, nominally, the principal author, Besson’s influence is obvious in the shape of the finished product, and there are extended quotations from his oeuvre, in particular
La Femme Nikita [the oft-imitated chase through the kitchen leading to the dive down the dumbwaiter into the laundry —since everyone else has stolen this, why not Besson himself] and
The Professional [cf. that electric thrill of fear that paradoxically runs through the upper stories of a building full of badasses when they realize that “Somebody’s coming up...somebody serious.”] — Other obvious borrowings include the
Fist of Fury episode in which the hero [e.g., Bruce Lee or Jet himself] busts up a school full of martial artists unassisted, and, thanks to some charming science fiction about the creative applications of acupuncture, the classic
Scanners exploding head [the dragon’s kiss of the title]. —Nor could any visit to Paris be complete without a brief chase through the sewers.
With a nod to the Schwarzenegger tradition, Jet is given a wholly unnecessary signature line [“Don’t do that again”][or He’ll Be Back], but the beauty of it, of course, is that he doesn’t need one; indeed, he hardly needs to say anything at all. [Recalling the traditional wisdom about John Wayne, that he was good in inverse proportion to the number of his lines.] — Ebert complains nonetheless that this has no plot. Neither has
Swan Lake, dumbshit.
____________A stroll in the park (7/19/01.)
