Even the color of her eyes seems keyed in to the character's desperation: Her usual sparkling green peepers here have the cloudiness of dulled jade. Here, disheveled and in streetwalker drag, stuck with the third-rate melodramatics of the repentant hooker/yearning mom role, Fonda still somehow seems like a real person. She seems completely open and yet completely wised up to what's going on at the same time. She has a quality that might be defined as melting canniness. Is there a better unsung actress in the movies? I have seen Bridget Fonda in more bad movies than good ones (though the latter, including "Shag," "A Simple Plan," "Rough Magic" and "Monkeybone," is far from a negligible bunch) and I have never seen her give a bad performance. It's a crummy, thankless role, but even when she has to service the dumb script, as in the scene where she squats down to pee in a shop doorway, Fonda, as always, works in a recognizable human range. Almost as an afterthought, Bridget Fonda enters the movie as a prostitute working for Richard, who got her addicted to heroin and then stole her daughter to make sure she stays under his thumb. The machinations of the rest of the movie have to do with Li trying to clear his name and get out of Paris, though it must be said he doesn't seem particularly eager to accomplish much beyond sitting in his safe house, eating dumplings and those great spongy shrimp chips you get in Chinese restaurants. Moving to take over the heroin smuggler's business, Richard engineers the guy's murder and frames Li for it. He doesn't know that Richard (Tchéky Karyo), the cop in charge of the operation, is using his office as a cover for his shadow life as a crime boss. The plot of "Kiss of the Dragon" (as if anyone will go to it for a plot) has to do with a Chinese agent (Li) heading to France to assist the Parisian police in busting a Chinese heroin smuggler. He's the fastest moving stiff I've ever seen. But in "Kiss of the Dragon" he gives off neither wit nor sadistic relish. Li certainly cuts a sleek figure in his invariably all-black (Jet-black?) outfits, and his face, chiseled and yet a little unformed at the same time, isn't a bad camera subject. And Bruce Lee, the apotheosis of all martial-arts movie stars, has a lean, mean fire in his eyes that added to the impact of his kicks and punches. Part of the joy of watching Jackie Chan is that he's an instinctive clown his face always registers amazement when one of his moves actually works against the bad guys. His moves are fast and brutally efficient but without any concomitant grace. In "Kiss of the Dragon," Li is a distanced, rather joyless figure. And though Nahon has a penchant for violence, he doesn't have a flair for it. Can he really be as unexciting as he comes off here? I'm hesitant to lay it all on him the director, Chris Nahon, making his feature debut, clumsily films most of the action in medium shots, which prevent us from seeing Li's whole body in motion. I've seen Li only in the first "Once Upon a Time in China," and that was some time back. Li's first bits of dialogue are so clipped and remote that you could be forgiven if your mind drifted back to those Italian Hercules epics that featured dubbed American voices emerging from a swath of dead air. He isn't dubbed in "Kiss of the Dragon," but he's so removed from the proceedings that he might as well be. As with most soundtracks, there is little worth hearing here, and offers very little for the imagination.As Claudette Colbert said of Rudy Vallee in "The Palm Beach Story," Jet Li has a nice little voice. ![]() The negative aspect is that these four promising tracks are all lumped together, and once you sift through those, the album falters and never really regains its footing. ![]() Bathgate's tirade draws a thug resemblance to Eminem, and while relying on humorous shock value, it succeeds in entertaining, as does Chino XL's contribution. Slum Village's remix of Daft Punk's "Aerodynamic" pulls the song in a more regulated hip-hop direction, and goes to show that these electronic wizards could easily find a successful career in album production and programming if they ever felt the need. The soundtrack does pick up with offerings from the talented N.E.R.D., whose "Lapdance" should please fans, as it's more programmed nature differs from the altered, more organic sound of the track featured on their In Search Of. Mystikal's offering, "Mystikal Fever," feels less like a rap song and more like an advertisement for his memorable name and gritty rap stylings. Kiss of the Dragon is a mediocre soundtrack that has bulked its lineup with an assortment of dismal and faceless hip-hop groups that offer very little new in the way of music.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |