Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

March 3, 2004

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by Chris Nahon
Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Starring
- Jet Li
- Bridget Fonda
- Tcheky Karyo
- Max Ryan
- Rick Young

WARNING: If you are French, you may not want to read the following review, as you and your nationality will be the butt of several jokes. I will respond to no complaints defending your cultural honor; that’s just part of the cross you have to bear for being French. (Although it’s illegal for you to bear crosses now, isn’t it?)

Somehow, nothing encapsulates this movie quite so well as the opening image: fuzzy bunny rabbits, wiggling their noses and rubbing their paws. And in the middle of them, a bloodied bunny carcass. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the movie, and it’s so baroque in its pretensions of depth that it can elicit nothing but giggles… but boy, somebody sure thought it was a good idea, huh?

Who knew France would be ahead of the curve in arming airline pilots?

I’ll try to recreate for you the tenor of the first twenty minutes, that of not knowing what the heck is going on. Thusly: Jet Li steps off a plane in Paris. He passes through customs, manned by a typical (for movies) ugly and snooty Frenchman. He takes a taxi ride with a Jamaican cabbie; the ride manages prove, as we’ve all come to expect, that Paris is a tiny little town in which all of the famous landmarks are bunched close together so that they can be seen during a short taxi ride. He then drops off his luggage at a Chinese bakery (run by Burt Kwouk, “Cato” from the Pink Panther movies) in a scuzzy back alley lined with prostitutes.

Jet Li arrives at his hotel and asks at the main desk if there are any messages for “Mr. Smith.” (A Chinese man, in Paris, going by “Smith.” Because it’s inconspicuous, I suppose.) He gets a note directing him to the bar, where he waits until a drunk airline pilot whispers that he needs to make a rendez-vous in the men’s room. There he meets a trio of toughs (French toughs, I remind you), who then take Li to meet their boss. (As they probably passed all the same landmarks again, I’m glad they mercifully edited us to our destination.) Their boss is a meaner-than-cuss Frenchman named Richards (Tcheky Karyo), whom we meet as he beats the tar out of someone on the floor of a shiny chrome restaurant kitchen. Richards has, by the way, some of the most noncommittal facial hair I’ve ever seen. Short stubble covers a little too much of his chin to be a goatee, but without any accompanying mustache. Is it meant to be a beard? Did he get razor rash on his chin and decide to skip just that area for a day? Had he meant to grow a mustache too but given up when he tried to blow his nose? These are the things you focus on when the movie hasn’t told you what’s going on.

“This go-go dancer gig is harder than I thought!”

Li introduces himself as Liu Jian, and he and Richards exchange some veiled unpleasantries about Liu’s “people” sending him to help Richard’s “people.” Together, they set in on a surveillance of the hotel lobby, where some Chinese businessmen are met by a pimp and two hookers, one of whom is Bridget Fonda, so you know this must a significant part of the plot. The main businessman gets busy with one of the hookers in his hotel suite under the watchful eye of Richards’ surveillance cameras, while Bridget Fonda goes and pukes in the bathroom, so she’s not there when the not-Fonda hooker pulls out some huge hairpins and stabs the businessman during the act.

Liu and Richards rush in — and Richards immediately finishes the job, on both the businessman and the hooker, with Liu’s lifted gun. It’s a frame! But Liu has lightning-fast reflexes, and manages to make it out the window, for a chase in and out of windows (he keeps leaving the windows conveniently open so the French can follow his trail), and through a laundryroom. Hey, I still have absolutely no idea what’s going on, but at least I get to see Jet Li kick French ass all over a laundryroom, using found objects like a dead-serious Jackie Chan. He also manages to steal one of the French surveillance tapes, the only one that caught Richards shooting the two people.

I remind you, all of this is just the first twenty minutes of the movie. Why, you might ask (if you’re still reading), did I recite this all for you? To demonstrate just how boring it can be when you have no idea what’s going on and what’s important to the story. The viewer finds himself treading water, waiting impatiently through the tense looks and the gunfire and the pseudo-artsy shots for something to be interested in, to care about. You know, a story.

“I wanted it ‘chop-socky,’ not ‘chop-sticky.’”

We do get to play catchup at this point: Richards is a police inspector in the drug trade (in more than one way). Liu is a Chinese drug cop. The Chinese loaned him to the French to help them catch a major Chinese druglord as he made a connection in Paris. Richards spins a tale to the Chinese diplomatic types about Liu having obviously been part of a drug conspiracy, sent to kill the druglord before he could be captured and testify.

Gee, it all makes sense now. Is there any reason that all of this information was withheld from us for so long? Absolutely none. I’m all for suspense and tension in movies, but apparently director Chris Nahon confused “keeping the audience in suspense” with “keeping the audience in the dark.”

Unfortunately, now that that cat’s out of the bag, there’s even less to look forward to. Liu tries to stay out of Richard’s sights like every conspiracy fugitive before him. The Chinese diplomats know that Richards’ story doesn’t hold water; Liu’s the most decorated agent on their bureau, with a complete devotion to his job. But when Diplomat Boy (Kentaro) meets with Liu on the sly to find out the story, Richards takes him out with a sniper rifle. Diplomat Boy, that is. Not Liu; no, Richards has made one of those evil-villain vows to take his nemesis alive, which gives Liu a chance to work over every member of the French S.W.A.T. team as they try to corral him. And once Richards gets his hands on the incriminating tape, does he immediately destroy it? Of course not; he’d love his mail-order Evil Mastermind diploma if he did that. He’s got to keep it around as something for Liu to come back after.

“And another thing — let ME wear the heels for a while!”

All of this gives us a pretty unambitious plot to build an action movie around, but it’s still serviceable, provided there’s enough asskicking to keep us distracted. What really drags the movie down, though, is the storyline with Bridget Fonda. Remember her? She’s a prostitute named Jessica, an American whom Richards keeps under his thumb by confining Jessica’s daughter to an orphanage and pumping Jessica full of heroin. When Richards doesn’t free her from her servitude after she helps with the hotel room setup (although I think we can all agree that throwing up in the bathroom probably wasn’t a big help), she’s sent back out to work her section of the street. And it’s only because Paris is such a teenie-weenie little town that the eight feet of sidewalk she works just happens to be right in front of the window of the little Chinese bakery that’s Liu’s safehouse! Boy! Wow! What are the odds, right?

It’s a maudlin, manipulative little plot thread that misses on all counts. No, Liu and Jessica don’t recognize each other; he just happens to give her an occasion to talk about her daughter, and she just happens to be around when he needs his arm sewn up. Then he just happens to beat her pimp and his goons into a bloody pulp, and that sets him on a collision course with Richards again.

It’s bizarre to realize that, in a movie directed and co-written by Frenchmen, there’s not a single sympathetic French character. Liu’s Chinese; Jessica’s American. Every French person we see is venal, banal, despicable, and usually butt-ugly. Somehow, I don’t feel bad about the occasional joke at the expense of the French when there’s so much cultural self-loathing on display by the filmmakers.

Richards suffers the ill effects of watching French cinema.

Long before the end, all credibility and audience respect has been sacrificed; how can you keep a straight face when part of Liu’s great plan is, “You go in and see Richards, get yourself handcuffed to the plumbing, trick the guard into leaving the room, break free, and while you’re there, find the incriminating videocassette that Richards was imbecilic enough to leave in his desk”? All that there really is left to look forward to is the climactic ending: Jet Li walking into a police station and taking on an entire precinct of police officers (including thirty members of a martial arts class) barehanded.

And if there’s one smart decision in the whole movie, it’s the setting. Admit it: The fact that it’s an entire station of French police officers makes it a little more believable, doesn’t it?