Kiss Of The Dragon
**.8 BM
Starring: Jet Li, Bridget Fonda, Tchecky Karyo

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I pretty much expected nothing but some decently executed kicking in this one, and that's about all this had going for it.

Jet Li is a Chinese cop on a mission to help Parisian cops do something, but then he's immediately framed for crooked shenanigans by them. So he meets a hooker and fights the bad cops to clear his name and save the hooker's kid by kicking a lot of people.

As my compatriot said when leaving the film "Jet Li, the martial artist, good. Jet Li, the actor, barely passable. Jet Li, the co-script writer... no." That sums up the film rather well. It's an inconsistent, silly film, really, and its flaws are generally pointed out by the pairing of an actual actress of some notable quality like Bridget Fonda with Li. Most of their scenes are adequate, but the gap in natural thespian ability is glaring.

My biggest problem with the film, however, involves Tcheky Karyo as the completely ridiculous bad guy. He's touted as "the best of the best" by his superiors, apparently completely trusted and perceived as a stand-up citizen. How this reputation was achieves is beyond me, because this guy's absurdly obnoxious in his evilness, smacking around and killing subordinates on a whim, perfectly content with showing his face at huge public bloodbaths and surrounds himself with incompetents at all times so he can loudly berate them and flip out at the slightest crimp in his shoddily-laid plans. Nobody would follow this tool's orders.

So, it's a dumb movie. But the kicking is good.

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