One year after Romeo Must Die proved to Hollywood that, yes, that spry little Asian from Lethal Weapon 4 could put butts in seats, Jet Li followed up that success with Kiss of the Dragon. The Franco-American actioner set in gay Paree, written and produced by The Professional’s Luc Besson, is of much higher quality.

In Kiss, Li — looking vaguely like Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens — is Liu Jian, a Beijing cop sent to France to help the local authorities nab a Chinese bad guy. (The reasons are cloudy, but no matter.) They set up surveillance in a swank hotel, watching the guy gets his kicks with a coked-up hooker. But when things go wrong, it’s the French inspector Richard (Tcheky Karyo, GoldenEye) who turns out to be the bad guy after all, killing the man and the ho, and setting up our pint-sized ass-kicker for the crimes.

But Richard — who screams a lot and keeps a turtle in his desk — picked the wrong Chinese man to push around. As stereotypes would expect, Liu is quite skilled in the martial arts (at one point even taking on an entire karate class at once!) and so adept at subduing his opponents with acupuncture needles that he keeps a supply of on his wrist. These work rather well — so well that I wonder why he bothered getting hit and kicked when he could have just planted his special magic pins on his antagonists’ various nerves and pressure points.

Liu is in possession of a videotape that shows Richard to be the true villain. At one point, the corrupt inspector gets this valuable piece of evidence back, only to have it stolen again because he just leaves it unlocked in his desk drawer. (Note to bad guys: Incriminating evidence is best left locked up, if not outright destroyed.) Richard also serves as a sugar daddy of sorts to ex-junkie and current street whore Jessica (Bridget Fonda, Lake Placid), who complains that she’s lucky to have five clients in a week. (This is how you know the film is fiction, as a hooker looking like Fonda would not be wanting for work. She’d be snapped up faster than the last chocolate long john at John Goodman’s family reunion.) Jessica is forced to join up with Liu to bring Richard down.

As if the whole needle angle weren’t enough of a gimmick, you also get a Scanners-esque meltdown with blood squirting out of every hole in a guy’s head, a goon getting cut in half in a laundry chute and a cute rabbit making a cannibalistic snack of a dead bunny. Insanity aside, Kiss of the Dragon is well worth seeing because of the sheer visceral pleasure of the fight scenes. The film has an annoying habit, however, of pumping some loud rap song whenever dudes start to tussle. As if the sloppy direction by Chris Nahon (Blood: The Last Vampire) and too-quick editing weren’t distracting enough, this is one trend I’d like to see nixed.

When it’s all said and done, Kiss of the Dragon can’t measure up to Black Mask (Li’s 1996 superhero kick-’em-up released to U.S. theaters in ’99 to capitalize on Lethal Weapon 4), but it’s a fine, fun hark back to the simple pleasures of kung-fu yesteryear. —Rod Lott

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To grant Golden Needles the alternate title of Mitchell Goes to the Orient — as a friend of mine did — is not out of line, even if Mitchell was a year away from its messy birth. This half-baked adventure presents star Joe Don Baker (Walking Tall) in the same vein: overweight, unkempt, presumably sweaty, kinda dumb and yet somehow wholly desirable to women out of his league. Imagine the guy who runs your grocery store’s produce department strutting around like he were George Clooney, and that’s Baker as Mitchell Dan.

The Golden Needles of the title refer not to what viewers will want to stab into their eyes upon the requisite sex scene, but the magic acupuncture statue that damn near everyone wishes to acquire. An American woman named Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley, Coma) attempts to buy the stolen statue in Hong Kong, but her offer is turned down. Her solution is to hire Dan, whom she just met at a brothel, to steal it for her. “That must be a bell-ringer of a statue,” he says.

Damn straight it is! If its needles are placed in the proper order, it grants “sexual vigor” to the poked! Although supposedly retired, Dan agrees if Felicity will hug him and say “I love you” to him right then and there. Dan has mommy issues, so Lord knows why the refined Felicity decides to sleep with him. He kisses as if her face were a roast beef platter; fittingly, their postcoital activity is stuffing themselves with seafood. You’ll swear off seafood.

Golden Needles is an action movie, although one might forget that fact while watching. It has two fun chases — one through a health spa; the other, a shipyard — and the brief moments that Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones) is onscreen busting out kung-fu moves are blessed ones. While watching the Hulk-esque act of Baker throwing Asians through plate glass never gets old, the movie does. That Robert Clouse went from the martial-arts classic Enter the Dragon to this obscurity in less than a year says more about the talent of Bruce Lee. —Rod Lott

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Beginning as a 1940s-era newsreel for some strange reason, Ninja: Shadow of a Tear picks up after the events of 2009’s flatly titled Ninja, with Caucasian gaijin Casey (Scott Adkins, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) living a happy life in Japan with his wife, Namiko (Mika Hijii, Alien vs. Ninja). Their marital bliss is short-lived, however, when Namiko is murdered while Casey’s out procuring Chocolate Thunder ice cream to soothe her pregnancy cravings.

Seeking respite at a Thai dojo run by Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, Pray for Death), Casey is much too grief-stricken to stay put, so with a slew of homemade ninja weapons and ninja potions, he flees to the Burmese jungle to take revenge on the persons responsible for Namiko’s death. All paths lead to Goro (Shun Sagata, Ichi the Killer), an aging drug lord who dispatches his victims with an infernal contraption of lassoed barbed wire. A lot of people die.

Very ’80s in its execution (no pun intended), Ninja: Shadow of a Tear — aka Ninja II — is a serviceable but unremarkable sequel from returning director Isaac Florentine (Undisputed III: Redemption). Its story is the least fulfilling factor; its martial arts sequences, superb. Looking more than a tad Affleckian, the charismatic Adkins is the real deal. He deserves to have a shot at a big-screen career that Jean-Claude Van Damme did, and if he had been born 20 years earlier, he likely would have. His ass-kicking skills make the action scenes easy for Florentine to shoot — all he has to do is keep his star within frame. Easy enough! —Rod Lott

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If you took X-Men and crossed it with The Island of Dr. Moreau, and then removed the good ideas of both and replaced them with pro wrestlers, you would — and do — have Black Mask II, the highly disappointing sequel to 1999’s terrific superhero kung-fu fest.

Although Jet Li wisely declined to return in the role, his Once Upon a Time in China trilogy director Tsui Hark — who merely served as producer on the original — agreed to helm the whole thing, a curious move akin to something like Steven Spielberg agreeing to do Poltergeist III.

In his film debut, Andy On (Mad Detective) stars as Black Mask, the genetically engineered super-soldier dedicated to protecting his public. This time around, the bad guys are the aforementioned pro wrestlers, five of them (including Tyler Mane, Rob Van Dam and, um, former porn star Traci Lords) infused with animal DNA that turns them into actual reptiles. Thus, Black Mask spends his time kicking guys in rubber suits. It’s as if the Syfy channel had been granted full creative input, with acting on the level of any given Slim Jim commercial. Once Black Mask was shown riding down a street on an elephant, I gave up any hope that the movie might get good.

The major problem is the weak script (with five credited writers), but also detracting from one’s enjoyment are a heavy reliance on CGI, the terrible kid actor and downright confusing editing. Martial-arts choreographer extraordinaire Yuen Woo Ping serves as just that, but I sure couldn’t tell, as there’s nothing here that will excite any of your senses, except your desire to go to the bathroom without bothering to hit the pause button. —Rod Lott

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To paraphrase one of Keanu Reeves’ more famous lines from The Matrix, he knows kung fu … so why not make his own martial-arts movie? In that directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, he proves competent behind the camera, which automatically places him above his skills in front of it. In the department of delivering lines, Reeves does a poorer job here than ever.

His Beijing businessman Donaka Mark is as wealthy as he is secretive, bankrolling an underground fight club broadcast overseas via pay-for-view, for which he constantly seeks contestants … partly because he keeps killing the losers. Fresh talent arrives in lowly courier Tiger Chen (played by stuntman Tiger Chen, House of Fury), who practices the same style of tai chi as 21 generations before him. To get paid to fight using tai chi would be dishonorable, Tiger tells Donaka, but when the young cub’s temple is served with a 30-day eviction notice, he quickly changes his stripes.

No matter what ‘roided foe or fightin’ style Donaka throws his way, Tiger emerges victorious — ironic since tai chi is something your grandma does at the Y for exercise. Tiger wins the bucks needed to save the temple, but at a price: running afoul of a Hong Kong police inspector (Karen Mok, Shaolin Soccer) who’s been investigating Donaka’s biz plan for quite some time and is looking to take down the arrogant Yank.

The big plus of Man of Tai Chi is that in the fight sequences — and there are many — viewers can tell what’s happening. In today’s rat-a-tat editing world, that’s a near-novelty. How much of that is the doing of Reeves or his action director, HK legend Yuen Woo Ping, is unknown, but we’ll give Reeves the benefit of the doubt … because we shall cut no slack for his performance. At one point, he laughs at Tiger with a scoff, and does so stiltedly, the audience practically can see Reeves reading a cue card on which is written, “LAUGH MEAN.” Our Man of Tai Chi, Chen, also is a man of few words, but he does okay — as long as we leave his haircut out of it. —Rod Lott

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