Audio By Carbonatix
Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong films, and a lot of the worst of Hollywood action films.
It may be an oversimplification to call it a Hollywood film, because both the setting and the director (commercials director Chris Nahon, making his feature debut) are French, as is the Big Name behind it all: Luc Besson, who made La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, The Professional, and the regrettable Joan of Arc biopic The Messenger, here serves as screenwriter (along with The Karate Kid and Lethal Weapon 3 veteran Robert Mark Kamen) and producer.
The film centers on a very old plot hook — an out-of-town spy/cop/hit man on a mission is set up as a patsy by the guys who hired him and must negotiate his way around culturally unfamiliar turf, trying to survive and prove his innocence while both the cops and the bad guys are out to kill him. He will find one person to trust — almost invariably a great-looking but damaged babe, usually a hooker, a barmaid or a moll of some sort.
In the current iteration, Li plays Liu Jian, a Beijing supercop who is sent to Paris at the request of French police officials investigating a Franco-Chinese drug-smuggling operation. The City of Lights has never looked more comically sinister than in the opening sequence: The first French character we meet — surly, ill-shaven — is so obviously a ruthless villain… until he turns out to be a simple customs clerk at the airport.
Liu then goes through a ridiculous series of contortions to find out one simple fact: He should report to a certain room in a certain hotel, where French police bigwig Richard (Tchéky Karyo) is running surveillance on a Chinese drug dealer. You’d think he could simply call the embassy or the Paris Central Police Bureau and be told, “Head over to Room 441 at the Palace Hotel,” but no, he has to get notes directing him to other notes to mysterious meetings in bars and bathrooms before he finally connects with Richard.
This, of course, requires that nearly every employee and every patron of the hotel be on Richard’s payroll. It appears that the entire Paris police force is undercover as part of this one operation. Of course we soon learn that Richard can afford it: He’s not only France’s top crime fighter; he’s also France’s top criminal! In fact this whole surveillance is a sham — Richard and his hundreds of accomplices actually intend to murder the drug dealer, and Liu has been brought in to be the fall guy. Luckily, through an indiscriminate mingling of the utterly impossible and the merely implausible, Liu is able to escape with a video proving that Richard was the real murderer.
Richard has, of course, convinced everyone that Liu is a psycho killer and has the entire might of the French police lined up to catch him. Let us note right now that all the gendarmes seem to be in on the conspiracy. The only ones in the entire French government not privy to the big secret are Richard’s bosses, who (of course) “have the fullest confidence in him.”
If this weren’t silly enough, Liu manages to team up with Jessica (Bridget Fonda), a prostitute and the only witness to the crime who can clear his name. Let me emphasize just how coincidental all this is: Liu is holed up in the tiny shop of his trusted contact (Burt Kwouk, who played Cato in the Pink Panther films), and Jessica just happens to be hooking right outside and just happens to need to go to the bathroom. Of all the bakeries in all of Paris, she strolls into this one looking for a toilet.
Now, one can imagine how relieved Liu would be to find her. Except that, thanks to various disguises and farce-like staging during the murder, neither of them ever got a good look at the other. So they become comrades on the run for quite a spell before they even realize their connection. What a lucky break! In this movie even the coincidences have coincidences.
It would be a waste of time to catalog the rest of the absurdities by which and wo-ping matrix crouching tiger hidden dragon in the first rank of hong kong stunt choreographers. unfortunately they failed to let him direct supervise editing well. under direction li made such terrific hk films fist legend the legend fong sai-yuk my father is a hero none hems whose garments this current dragon allowed kiss.>
