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Jet Li is a stud. Let's just all acknowledge that right up front. Unfortunately, this isn't a particularly good movie, even taken at the outset as nothing more than an otherwise empty vessel providing a showcase for his outstanding physical talents. There's maybe three or four action set-pieces, all of which failed to ignite in my breast any extraordinary excitement. Whether this is due to the uninteresting banality of the surrounding story sapping vitality from the kinetic action ballet that is the flick's true raison de être, or to some inherent mediocrity of the action choreography itself, or perhaps just to some failing on my part--I've seen too many Hong Kong kung-fu flicks, I'm getting too old for this stuff, etc.--is an open question, but frankly, it's not anywhere near urgent enough for me to want to fire up the three or four brain cells needed to generate even a tentative answer.
Li plays a Chinese agent/cop who has been sent to Paris by his government to work with a Parisian police task force that is investigating some sort of drug deal criminality that involves Chinese nationals. Naturally, the police happen to be corrupt and deeply uninterested in anyone looking over their shoulder; when Li sees something he shouldn't during a stakeout, he immediately jumps to the head of the "terminate with extreme prejudice" list. Tchéky Karyo, as the head of the bad cops, takes his best shot at riffing on the psychotic gangleader cop role done so memorably by Gary Oldman in The Professional, a much more interesting and important movie than this one (probably not coincidentally, Luc Besson directed that movie, while he produced this one). Bridget Fonda, never my fave, plays a prostitute in dire straights, in an incarnation of that particular role that probably could not be any more stereotyped had they brought in a group of aspiring 8th grade script-writers to work on it. Her entire sub-plot is silly and unnecessary.
Kiss of the Dragon is not actively bad or offensive, it's just mediocre and fails to excite any real interest in the story it's telling. It might be worth a desultory viewing if one really has a jones for some Jet Li style action, but really, if that's the case, I'd as soon recommend renting something like, say, Once Upon a Time in China, The Black Mask, or The Bodyguard from Beijing.
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