Kiss of the Dragon

_**Jet Li flick in Paris with Bridget Fonda**_

An expert Chinese intelligence agent (Jet Li) is sent to Paris to help the head inspector (Tchéky Karyo) in apprehending a Chinese mob boss at a ritzy hotel, unaware that it’s a set-up. Bridget Fonda plays an American prostitute that “Johnny” (Li) develops a relationship with during the misadventure.

"Kiss of the Dragon" (2001) is a big city crime thriller with the expected overdone martial arts action due to Li. It’s a modern mixing of “From Russia with Love” (1963) with the preposterous action of “The Gauntlet” (1977) and the martial arts of “Enter the Dragon” (1973). It was Bridget’s second to last theatrical movie before calling it a day (although she also did some TV work in 2001-2002, like her final piece “Snow Queen”).

I like the fact that the protagonist, Liu Jian (Li), is confident and an expert fighter, but also very human, even meek, as a stranger in a strange land (being his first visit to Paris). The action is thrilling with a sense of style counterbalanced by some quality drama with Fonda’s character and her situation.

If I were to nitpick, some eye-rolling elements bring down the film’s quality. For instance, Liu Jian storms a police building, opens a door and suddenly enters a dojo full of martial arts guys ready to take him down. Why Sure! Earlier, a British pilot grabs not one, but two Uzis to kill Liu Jian in the swank lobby, shooting up the entire place. Did he really need to cause mass devastation to kill one Chinese man? I'm sure the corrupt Inspector (Tchéky Karyo) wouldn't enjoy explaining the wholesale desolation to the mayor.

Moreover, there are too many hip-hop songs on the soundtrack. I could see one or two (at the most), but they overdid it. It smacked of trying to be too ‘hip.’

The film runs 1 hour, 38 minutes and was shot entirely in Paris & nearby Seine-Saint-Denis, France.

GRADE: B-

Kiss of the Dragon (2001) is set and was shot on location in Paris. It features Chinese and French characters, some of them played by Chinese and French actors. What are the odds that no one in the movie speaks either Chinese or French? Some of these characters are diplomats, yet they have apparently never heard of an interpreter. It’s like they all learned English just so they could talk to each other and, even more strangely, among themselves.

This linguistic oddity is but the tip of the stupid iceberg. The film opens with Liu Jian (Jet Li) arriving in Paris, ostensibly for “pleasure.” Liu goes to a hotel lobby, where the concierge hands him a note that says “bar.” In the bar, an airplane pilot directs Liu to the men’s room. From there, Liu ends up in the kitchen, where he finally meets Jean-Pierre Richard (Tchéky Karyo), who is in the middle of beating some poor extra into a bloody pulp. Why? Because Luc Besson, who co-wrote and produced Kiss of the Dragon, also wrote and directed Leon, which featured Gary Oldman’s scenery-chewing, movie-stealing performance. Karyo got stuck with the thankless task of playing the Gary Oldman role without being Gary Oldman and playing it straight to boot.

Both Liu and Richard are cops. Liu is on an official mission to help the local police bust a Chinese mobster. So, what’s with the cloak-and-dagger bullshit? It’s not like Liu has to go undercover or anything.
Through events not worth recounting and for reasons that I don’t think are ever explained, Richard kills the Chinese gangster in cold blood and pins the murder on Liu. Liu escapes with a surveillance tape that incriminates Richard. Liu gets ahold of an “emergency cell phone” that was stored in a locker at a train station, presumably on the off chance that Liu were to be framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Liu calls a Chinese diplomat. They meet in a public place. Liu gives him the tape, but Richard’s men kill the guy and retrieve the tape. Why Liu couldn’t go straight to the embassy with the tape, I haven’t the foggiest. It’s certainly not because the Chinese mafia is also after him for allegedly killing their boss — they know better than to bother avenging a mere plot device.

Jessica (Bridget Fonda), the hooker who witnessed the whole thing and can prove Liu’s innocence, just happens to turn tricks for her pimp (none other than Richard, of course) right outside the Chinese restaurant that doubles as the safe house where Liu is hiding. How convenient.

Richard plies Jessica with intravenous drugs, although seemingly just enough for her to catch a buzz and avoid withdrawal altogether — which kind of defeats the purpose of getting someone hooked on drugs to make them do your bidding. Richard has also kidnapped Jessica’s daughter, whom he keeps in an orphanage. You’d think this alone would suffice to have Jessica at his beck and call. Does she really need the additional motivation of a fix?

Liu turns out to be a master of “forbidden” acupuncture. It takes a single prick in the back of the head (the titular “kiss of the dragon”) to bring about a painful, gruesome death. It must have seemed clever that both the hero and the villain use needles to incapacitate and vanquish their foes — and it might have been, too, were it not that whereas drug paraphernalia can cause irreparable damage, acupuncture is, in one word, flim-flam. Insofar as it can be said to work, it does so by classical conditioning and other factors collectively known as the placebo effect. By definition, a placebo cannot kill you — but then I wouldn’t expect the guy who made a movie about the ten percent of the brain myth to know this.