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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