Kiss of the Dragon

KISS OF THE DRAGON (2001)

Call me a crazy-eyed dreamer. For me, this movie looked like it was going to work for the first half. The people that I saw it with, however, were rolling their eyes and guffawing with disbelief much sooner than that.

The nickel tour: mysterious guy Liu Jian (Jet Li) comes to Paris for mysterious reasons. Turns out he's a Beijing policeman in Paris to help the Parisian police nab a Chinese heroin dealer and his French contact. To the surprise of no one in the audience, Liu Jian's liaison, oily police chief Jean-Pierre Richard (Thceky Karyo) (introduced beating a man nearly to death in the back of a ritzy hotel kitchen) is the Parisian contact and tries to kill everyone and everything at the meeting. Jian escapes and morally compromised American hooker Jessica (Bridget Fonda) is the only other "innocent" to survive (a real shame because everyone in the audience, including me, liked the coked-up out-of-control hooker that Jessica was supposed to be tag-teaming with; whoever the woman was, she had enough energy to steal the scene from everyone else and might have grabbed the whole movie if her character had lived). Richard, also a pimp, slaps Jessica around, shoots her up, and throws her back out on the street to continue whoring until she's earned enough to get her daughter back.

International productions are always scary gumbo; Jet Li and Bridget Fonda in Paris fighting corrupt French police? Son of a cordon bleu! And yet I had hope, because the movie was co-written and co-produced by Luc Besson, the talented French filmmaker who turned a similar mess, The Professional (or Leon as the rest of the world knows it), into an enjoyable and moving (albeit messy) affair. Among other talents, Besson is one of the only guys who can actually make Eurotrash seem threatening. Also in the mix is Mr. Robert Kamen, brutally efficient hack screenwriter of (among others) Karate Kid Part I and II. (And, as someone who watched it recently can attest, the first Karate Kid movie is a highly effective piece of screenwriting; arguably as much a part of the movie's success as Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita). So, despite the snickerings of my group as Richard and his boys filled a four-star hotel with bullet holes and grenade shrapnel, I had the audacity to hope that Kiss of the Dragon would end up, like Besson's best work, as a brutal piece of melodrama with some fine performances.

Bridget Fonda is on the right: the hooker everyone liked is on the left And the first half comes close to keeping that promise, at least to me, as Richard's scenes with Jessica seem suitably creepy, with Richard both caring for, and slapping about, Jessica with the same dead-eyed poker face, or the scenes of Jessica pathetically begging to use the toilet and reduced to pissing in the doorway after being slapped about some more by other prostitutes. Interspersed with this are scenes where Jian hides in the shop of a sleeper agent while trying to make contact with his comrades in the Chinese embassy, and generally having platoons of heavily armed men thrown at him every time he steps outside. Right up until the time when Jian and Jessica's paths finally cross in a meaningful way (sending pimps, protection men and bullets thrown about the shopfront like so many shrimp chips), the audience is cheering, stamping and applauding.

But the applause turns to laughs for the final third of the film as Jessica grows weepier and more helpless, more chiding and angry, as she tries to convince Jian to help her as he, in turn, tries to convince her to help him. And not even the final beautiful choreographed fights in offices, workout rooms and Richard's lair can save the movie after that. Or, as Brian put it as the credits started to roll, "wow, that sucked."

It's all the little things that add up to Kiss of the Dragon's suckage: no matter how successfully Luc Besson seems to have Like a balloon banging on the ceiling trying to escape... outsourced his style to director Chris Nahon, little glitches in staging, and an inability to help the actors' performances deepen and change as the movie progresses, make the film seem not just inert, but to actually recede in competence as it goes along; Bridget Fonda does her best work here in some time ("which means she still sucks," as pal Rob might put it, if asked) but plays easily one of the stupidest prostitutes since Nancy Allen in Blow Out (not an easy feat, that); Karyo's performance starts off insanely over-the-top and then bangs about on the ceiling like a balloon trying to escape because there's nowhere else to go; and finally, not enough fights. For me, of course, this film galls (as so many Americanized HK hybrids do) because the first-rate action scenes are directed by Corey Yuen, who's made at least five HK movies far better than this (Yes, Madam and Righting Wrongs automatically come to mind). He coulda directed the whole film in his sleep and still made it twice as interesting, but instead ends up relegated to coming in at key points and trying to save the movie from itself. Even in this he's short-changed, as the scenes look too American: filmed close and cut fast, (typically used by Americans to serve the dual purpose of hiding the stuntman's shortcomings while emphasizing impact over movement). Used here, one assumes, by aesthetic choice rather than necessity, the technique only ends up vivisecting the choreography's natural flow and obscuring Jet Li's dynamic grace.

As for Jet, I think he may prove to be the best of the imported HK actors. His English is very good, he obviously continues to have input into his characters (a cool little touch is Jian's acupuncture needles which allow him to both alternately cure, paralyze, and, at the end, deliver the titular "Kiss of the Dragon") and he has an apparent lack of ego that allows him to inhabit what little character he's given: Liu Jian is a guy who is nothing without his work, and whereas someone like Tom Cruise can think of nothing to bring to such a character but workaholic thrill-seeking, Jet makes the character faintly sad and slightly comic.

Brian recommended this film if you could watch it on DVD, fast-forward to the fight scenes and then return it to the rental store claiming it was scratched and unwatchable. I guess I would say Kiss of the Dragon is something you might catch as a matinee if you loved both HK action movies and Luc Besson's Eurotrash crime melodramas and wanted to see what happened if you mixed both of them. Or maybe you could sneak into the theater and watch it when you've already paid for another movie. Either way though, you'll probably conclude that Kiss of the Dragon, really, is little more than greasy peck on the cheek.

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