Jet Li sinks further into direct to video obscurity with the insufferably unoriginal action movie staple of dual roles. To facilitate such an unexciting prospect, the plots of The Matrix, T2 and Highlander are hastily bolted together to form a story revolving around alternate universes with many versions of everyone and one bad-guy trying to kill all his clones and become the all-powerful One. Meanwhile two people from the multiverse's police force try and bring him in.
Of course, Li plays both the power-hungry dimension hopper and his final target, a cop in our very own universe. So we get the usual initial confusion and subsequent mistaken identities making Good Li go on the run from his police buddies. The rest of the plot is not really worth mulling over as it couldn't be more obvious from the outset.
Li, although comparing favourably with many of his compatriots who jumped ship to the US martial arts genre, still has to convince us of his command of the English language. So while you can at least understand what he is saying, he struggles to inject anything like real emotion into his acting. This means when playing bad characters he tries to get away with just looking surly and bobbing his head a bit.
If Li has a reasonable defence for his poor acting, what excuse has Jason Statham got for this performance? Gurning like an idiot throughout, muttering his forced American accent out the corner of his grimace it is quite an embarrassing attempt to impress Hollywood and we can only hope for his sake that he does better in the upcoming The Transporter. Meanwhile Delroy Lindo hangs around for a bit, then gets too embarrassed and slinks out of the story.
So, the really important bit is always the fights. Again, as in Romeo Must Die, fancy effects are used to stop us watching Li do what he does best. Here because he is a superfast Neo knock-off, the baddies are slowed down and so his fighting doesn't look quite so impressive against the human sloths. Sometimes it looks quite cool, but most of the time it makes the fights predictable and short. As for the film's ending, they eventually get round to the obligatory face off, but wait, which one is the real baddie? Obviously as an afterthought they promptly sort it all out (in a ridiculously easy to nit-pick fashion) to make way for a final CG'd-to-death fight. |
