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Tony Fait (DMX, awfully pretty to look at, and half decent at the whole acting thing) and his crew have pulled off yet another robbery, some shiny shiny diamonds, including their specific target of mysterious black diamonds. Then, tragically, they manage to lose everything in getting away from the scene (some subway tunnel maintenance guy is about to make the find of a lifetime down there), except the black diamonds, thank goodness! Those, instead, get taken off their fence, Archie (Tom Arnold, and yes, he’s even occasionally funny) by one of the many bad guys in the film. Almost enough to make a man go straight, no?

But economic loss is not Tony’s only problem. See, the black diamonds were supposed to go to Ling (Mark Dacascos, the faux-Chinese guy in many a film, including the under-rated good-bad-film Drive), and Ling really really wants them. Will he do a deal with Fait? Hell no – why do business when instead he can be Evil and kidnap Fait’s young daughter and hold her in exchange for the black diamonds? Of course, since Fait no longer has the diamonds, he has to get them back from guy who took them – and to complicate things, there’s this very quiet Chinese guy named Su (Jet Li, kicking butt less pyrotechnically than one would hope) who claims the diamonds belong to him. Poor Fait – whatever happened to decent people who just pay for their stolen goods and let a burglar do his job?

It should be obvious by now that this film is completely ridiculous. Any film that uses a rocket launcher to open a safe, drives ATVs across rooftops, and uses a tank in any capacity, yet doesn’t manage to film Jet Li in more than one and a half decent fight scenes, just can’t be any good, even as a really good bad movie. For that, it would have needed worse acting (DMX is surprisingly tolerable, Gabrielle Union as one of his compatriots is quite solid in a small role, and Jet Li is very, very quiet – though Dacascos is silly enough for all of them, really), and many more explosions, plus Jet Li kicking everyone’s ass at least once, maybe twice for good measure. Every action movie stereotype is here: the self-interested, disliked yet useful fence, the loyal teammates of the lead, the sexy female companion of the bad guy (Kelly Hu, who gets to fight it out with Union in yet another poorly-filmed fight scene), the plucky kidnap victim – even an Imprisoned Thug Crime Lord (Chi McBride). And please, don’t try to understand the pseudo-scientific Twist at the end of the film...it will just make your ears bleed.

Despite all that, it’s a decent film while it’s in progress. Though it never quite delivers on the promise of Li, or makes a solid buddy movie with him and DMX, or blows enough stuff up, or is quite funny enough, or explains the title at all, the film is a passable way to spend a couple of hours. Certainly, it never tries to be a real film, to its credit, and it really needs all the credit it can get (speaking of which, the closing credits roll over a relatively funny scene between Arnold and Anthony Anderson, talking about how the story should be made into a movie – if you’ve sat through the film, it’s worth sitting a few more minutes to see them).

There are better action films, and better buddy movies, and better movies with Jet Li – hell, there are even better movies with Mark Dacascos. But if there’s a better movie where a midget is used as a bludgeoning device, I haven’t seen it! Or I’ve blocked it out.

link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=7110&reviewer=291
originally posted: 03/04/03 13:13:44
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