Entertaining-enough movie that does not make the best use of Jet LI's charm and martial arts' skills. His love interest, Aaliyah is beautiful enough to distract the sternest fighter from taking his revenge against those who killed his brother, but the chemistry between the pair is never given a chance by the script to go beyond the superficial.
In keeping with the endemic White supremacism of Hollywood, there is no sex scene between the two that one would normally expect - as a writers' cheating way of dramatically cementing their relationship - that could conceivably have engaged our empathy and fleshed-out the characters somewhat more than here. This rather contradicts the reference to Romeo and Juliet in the title of the movie; rendering it a redundant label without a dramatic referent, since the story of "star-crossed lovers" is never present - as if the political status quo that such a story critiques were the best form of social organization. (American Whites have an odd complex about sexual intercourse between people from different parts of the world despite the fact that the US comprises precisely such people - almost as if it is believed that miscegenation would mark the beginning of the end of Western culture. In a democracy, the fear is that the dark-skinned would soon outnumber the light and assume greater political power over Whites.)
The fights, however, are imaginatively staged but over-edited, in the Western manner - as if LI's considerable martial skills need help from a tame editor. The more fluent style of Chinese action movies allows the audience to fully appreciate the physical abilities of the performer; while forcing us to accept that it is actually them doing these death-defying stunts. Like the money shot in hard-core pornography, this is a very important consideration in fight movies that this film partially elides - to its own disbenefit.
The cultural preoccupation with family is well presented and fully justifies Jet LI being parodied in The Expendables as doing what he does for his family. The filmmakers here have enough respect for this convention of Chinese movies to allow LI to perform these scenes in Chinese; making them that much more emotionally effective. Yet this is no Fist of Legend and, in an American context, probably never could be.
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