Cynical Cinema

Jet Li has recently suggested that he will no longer be making kung-fu epics. This does not mean he will not be making movies where he is good at kung fu, because if that were the case he would no longer have a career. No, what it means is that we are no longer going to be treated to brilliant movies like Hero or Once Upon A Time In China. It also means we are not going to see him in decent-to-pretty-good movies like Fearless any more. No, Jet Li has quit the genre that has provided him with his only truly excellent moviesto concentrate on American movies where he still performs martial arts, (wushu, to be specific) only now he will wear normal street clothes and be paired with wisecracking cops. Like Jackie Chan movies, only without the charm, the elaborate stunts or the laughs. These are the films that have made Li a star in America, and not one of them has been very good. Romeo Must Die, The One, Lethal Weapon 4, Kiss of the Dragon, Cradle 2 The Grave? All fairly awful. (I must confess to having a soft spot for Unleashed, if only for Bob Hoskins and Jet Li’s surprisingly decent performance.)

So now, having left the martial arts epics forever with the disappointing Fearless, Jet Li brings us War, a movie that sees him performing bad-ass wushu manouevers as he is paired with a wisecracking bad-ass cop, played by Jason Statham. Li plays the assassin “Rogue”, not the shape-shifting naked hottie Rebecca Romijn Rogue, but a variation on the theme. You see, Rogue has this habit of using plastic surgery to change his face after every hit, thereby never being identifiable to the cops. This is a device used in many movies. I’m not sure how reliable this method of concealing your identity is. I have seen what someone who undergoes multiple plastic surgeries looks like. They look like Donatella Versace, The Cat Lady, and Michael Jackson. They do not look like Jet Li. Also, it occurs to me that you can still tell that Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson, even if it’s the Wes Craven freaky-horror film version of Michael Jackson. In War, the assumption is that plastic surgeons can just go ahead and re-create faces at will. For example, if I wanted to look like Russell Crowe, (and I do), it would be very easy for me to go see Jet Li’s plastic surgeon, pay him enough, and emerge with an Australian accent and a penchant for phone-throwing. Tremendous.

Early on in the movie, Jason Statham’s partner and his entire family are killed by the nefarious assassin, Rogue. In the scene, Rogue is wearing a mask. I wonder why? A mask? When Jet Li, as Rogue, dispatches people with extreme prejudice throughout the rest of the movie, he seems unconcerned about who might see his face. So why the mask in the early scene? I bet we’ll find out later…I certainly hope the reason is that THAT Rogue was a different guy, and at the end of the movie we can still like Jet Li. I don’t want to see a Jet Li movie where I don’t like Jet Li. That would ruin my good-time movie fun. Also, as one of the entertain-me-but-don’t-challenge-me movie viewing mob, I would like a satisfactory ending to explain everything, where all the good guys live and all the bad guys die and the buddies walk off into the sunset together.

I must say the ending of War WAS a surprise to me. However, it was not surprising because it was a crazy twist I didn’t see coming, but because I couldn’t believe that even this movie would have resorted to an ending this dumb. Even the most bloated, brainless couch potato watching this film would be unsatisfied with the ending. The twist and the finish are so badly tacked-on that they might as well have been one of those it-was-all-just-a-dream endings. And the twists accomplish a few things. First off, they ensure that you will never watch the movie again, because knowing the truth at the end means the entire rest of the movie makes absolutely no sense. Secondly, if you pay close attention to the ending, it creates more plot holes and problems than it solves. And thirdly, it will not even satisfy those good-guys-live-and-bad-guys-die movie watchers. There is nothing wrong with being one of those movie watchers. You don’t want to think too hard about a film, you just want to be entertained. That is OK.

However, War has spent so long, through the whole film, catering to that exact moviegoer, making sure that they ARE entertained, that the ending will leave that particular viewer unusually unsatisfied and puzzled. It’s like they got to the end and thought “hey, you know what would make critics like this? Making it dark, and strange, and unsatisfying, with a twist - critics love that stuff”. Their problem was that they didn’t realize that if you are going to do that, you have to be aware of where you are going when you START the movie, and not just tack it on at the end. (This doesn’t always work either - as the next review will explain.)

Jet Li is a very good actor and an even better martial artist, but his skills are best used in the martial arts epics. It looks as though Hero will always be his best movie, simply because he has given up on that type of movie, and has resigned himself to doing movies such as War. His wushu skills are still breathtaking, the fights are still awesome, but the stories in these movies are crappy at best, and come out of some ridiculous screenplay machine they have in Hollywood where you feed in the names of the actors and out pops a script. “Jason Statham and Jet Li” whirrr….War! (Well, they were together in The One as well, but this time Statham gets equal billing.) It’s depressing. You know that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the band is playing the country fair, opening for the puppet show? Because Nigel Tufnel is gone, they have only six songs to play, and once those songs are done they kick into the “jazz odyssey”? Jet Li’s recent career move reminds me of this. He has given up being awesome, like Spinal Tap, and has gone ahead with his jazz odyssey. American films.