Affliction - 1988

Affliction (1998)

Paul Schrader has written such famed films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and he has directed a dozen others, including American Gigolo and his latest, Affliction, now available in an impressive 1.85:1 widescreen DVD transfer.

A Psychological Study of a Man on the Edge

The director once maintained that his tortured heroes are "crushed, bruised romantics." Nick Nolte's haunting portrayal of Wade Whitehouse in Affliction certainly fits that description. The film, based on Russell Banks' 1989 novel, is a powerfully economical psychological study of a man on the edge.

Wade, a divorced, small-town New Hampshire "one man police force" — as Banks described him — is a sympathetic guy struggling to do the right thing with his daughter, but he's pursued by the furies of family violence. Glenn (James Coburn), his gloomily alcoholic and belligerent father, has crippled Wade's ability to return love as an adult. Though girlfriend Marge tries to connect with Wade, he just can't seem to outrun his demons. After Wade's called to the scene of a hunting accident, he starts to suspect murder. But is the mystery all in Wade's confused mind?

We don't meet Coburn's Glenn until nearly a half-hour into the film. Pop's presence, however, uncannily lives in Nolte's performance. "You! I know you," Glenn growls at Wade late in the picture. "You're my blood." It's a chilling moment. No wonder Coburn won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar®. He seems to loom and tower over his burly adult boy. This is a father-son relationship made in hell.

The other supporting roles are also memorable. Sissy Spacek's heartbreakingly tender and understanding Marge is matched by Mary Beth Hurt's wary and protective portrayal of Wade's ex-wife, Lillian. As Rolfe, Wade's sensitive younger brother, Willem Dafoe has few scenes, but proves to be an effective narrator.

Yet Affliction is Nolte's movie from start to finish. He gradually reveals Wade's buried emotional world of powerlessness and paranoia. It's a devastating multi-layered performance that yields more upon repeat viewing.

No Extras, but a Skillful Transfer

It's too bad that the DVD doesn't include an audio commentary from Nolte, Coburn, and Schrader. On the other hand, the transfer has been managed skillfully. Paul Sarossy's chilly, atmospheric cinematography lends another dimension to the inner landscape of Affliction's characters. The crisp Dolby Digital soundtrack is also crucial to the film's impact, as Schrader uses it to seamlessly move in and out of Wade's troubled past.

An affair of love - 1999

An Affair of Love (1999)

Due to the fact that human beings have this capacity called intelligence, sexual desire amongst our species is an immensely complicated matter — it can't just be boiled down to reproductive instincts. When American movies attempt to handle this subject — especially when it concerns female lust — they almost always come up short. Too often, the women in these unpersuasive and uninvolving films are too pretty, too neurotic, too idealistic, or too dull to engage our attentions. Luckily, we have Le Cinema Français and films like An Affair of Love to remedy the problem. French filmmakers have consistently been responsible for bringing more mature fare about the complications of love and lust to these shores.

Affair is a brief, but pithy drama about an unnamed woman (Return of Martin Guerre's radiant Nathalie Baye) who has a fantasy she wants to enact with a stranger. Her offer is taken up by a handsome, middle-aged man (Sergi Lopez from Western) of Spanish descent. Their story is told mostly in flashback as an unseen man asks each of them separately about the relationship. When speaking to this interviewer, the pair often differ on certain details — she thinks they met online while he believes she placed an ad in a pornographic magazine; he believes they exchanged photos, but she comments that she didn't know what he looked like until they met face-to-face. In this way, the film touches on the faultiness of human memory in the same way as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, but with far less pretentiousness.

Although the nature of the woman's fantasy is never revealed, it's not important. As she tells the interviewer, "It was an act of love. It could have been anything." What is central is the film's ability to convey the whimsical and powerful nature of desire and the increasing level of connection between the two.

After the first encounter, they agree to meet weekly. The film fascinatingly delineates how the power dynamic between them continually shifts. One thought-provoking suggestion posed in An Affair of Love is that by getting the sex part over with early, a couple has a greater opportunity to be completely honest with one another. Each of the protagonists may not know the other person's name or where he or she works, but they do know about each other's fears and fantasies — and ultimately, which of these things is more important?

There is, of course, a moment when the characters have to decide if they want to pursue a more traditional romantic relationship, but since such a path requires a different kind of commitment and a form of emotional sharing that diverges from how they currently communicate, there are barriers they must overcome in order to walk it successfully. Affair limns these difficulties concisely and wisely, especially in a segment featuring an elderly couple whose marriage has soured. Because these are the only two people that the trysting pair meet over the course of their affair, this couple's romantic malaise is seen as a symbol of the abyss that can await people who marry the wrong person.

It's no big secret that our hearts and heads rarely agree with our loins, but Philippe Blasband's script explores this dichotomy carefully. Affair shows that there are advantages to beginning a relationship with sex, but that a couple has to be compatible out of bed as well. While day-to-day mundanities may be of little importance on a larger scale, they are an integral part of our lives and must play a part of any long-term romantic endeavor.

In a remarkably brief 80 minutes, the cast, screenwriter Blasband, and director Frédéric Fonteyne manage to depict the intensity and complexity of a single relationship with much more acuity than most of the interminable romantic pap that Hollywood constantly churns out. As Baye's character tells her interlocutor, "In movies, sex is always Heaven or Hell, never in between the two. In life, it's almost always in between." An Affair of Love captures this middle state perfectly.

Adams Family - 1991

They're creepy, they're kooky, they're mysterious and spooky — and now they're on DVD. The Addams clan, those wacky, offbeat psychopaths who made their debut on TV in the '60s and first graced the big screen in 1991, have never been in better form. In The Addams Family and its 1993 follow-up, Addams Family Values, director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black, Get Shorty) combines stellar casting, witty scripts, and top-notch cinematography and special effects in his cauldron and bubbles up a pair of darkly funny, stylish classics.

Beneath the Cobwebs Lurks a Loving Family

The first movie introduces the viewer to the core Addams family — passionate patriarch Gomez (the late, lamented Raul Julia); statuesque matriarch Morticia (Anjelica Huston); and their children, stoic Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) and grim, pale Wednesday (a very young Christina Ricci). All of the actors are spot-on perfect in their roles, particularly Ricci, whose performance as Wednesday helped cement her status as the queen of dark, offbeat films.

The plot kicks in when Gomez's long-lost brother Fester (Christopher Lloyd), missing for 25 years, suddenly returns (or does he?). But the story is really secondary here — what drives the movie are its stunning visuals and pitch-black humor. (Morticia to her husband: "Don't torture yourself, Gomez. That's my job.") That, and the fact that beneath the cobwebs, the Addamses are a close, loving family that values the bonds of blood above all else.

Those bonds are put to the test in Addams Family Values, which is just as hilariously macabre as its predecessor and has more plot to boot. The movie opens with the birth of the Addams' third child, Pubert, to whom Pugsley and Wednesday take an immediate, violent (as in guillotines and guns) dislike. To spare a serenely stressed-out Morticia — "I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade," she says — Gomez hires a nanny, Debbie (played by a voluptuous, delightfully cracked Joan Cusack), who turns out to be a serial killer known as the Black Widow. Debbie makes a play for rich bachelor Fester, clearing her way by packing the kids off to perky Camp Chippewa, where some of the film's funniest scenes take place. Will Wednesday save her uncle from disaster? If you don't know (or can't guess), you'll have to watch the movie to find out.

Flawless DVDs with Few Features

Both films look and sound terrific on DVD; their transfers are flawless (impressive, considering that the first one is now almost 10 years old) and the high quality means that every detail of the elaborate sets and special effects is crystal clear. Both are presented in widescreen (1.85:1) only and have been enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Unfortunately, neither disc offers much in the way of features (would it have killed them to include the music video for M.C. Hammer's "Addams Groove"?). The short list includes theatrical trailers (two apiece), scene selection, and English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired, as well as English Dolby Surround and 5.1 Surround sound options.

The Abyss

... When you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
— Frederich Nietzche

With these words begins an undersea journey that now goes deeper than ever before. Twentieth Century Fox has outdone itself with the special edition release of The Abyss on DVD. The equivalent of an encyclopedia devoted entirely to the making of one spectacular, technologically innovative, and commercially unsuccessful film, The Abyss Special Edition might just be the new standard by which all DVDs are measured. This two-disc set includes both the theatrical release version and writer/director James Cameron's Special Edition, which adds 28 minutes that redefine the film in both scope and structure. It is to the studio's credit that they have layered this film with so many extras for its much-anticipated release on disc. From a reviewer's perspective, however, the resulting task is not unlike the challenges the film's characters must face: This DVD set goes so deep into the making of The Abyss that it might just be possible to drown.

What is The Abyss? Well, it's an underwater action thriller. It's a love story. It's a cautionary tale about nuclear proliferation and the insidious paranoia that fuels it. It's an alien encounter story. It's a science-fiction epic that unfolds on a human scale. And, it's a very, very deep trench at the bottom of the ocean. With all these factors combined, The Abyss is one hell of a movie.

The Approach

The coolness of these discs is evident from the first moment they load in your player. Designed by the same studio behind Fox's outstanding Alien Legacy collection, the menu interface on these discs is second-to-none in terms of sheer DVD-induced exhilaration. Swooping up from the titular undersea crevasse, you approach DeepCore, the underwater drilling rig that is the setting for most of the film, and emerge in the sub bay that plays so prominently throughout the film. Once there, the various menus navigate you through hatches, portholes, and computer terminals as you select from the myriad of features contained on the discs. The shimmering interface is almost worth the price of the set itself.

The Film(s)

Both the theatrical and special editions of the film are presented in the original 2.35:1 widescreen format, accompanied by audio in either Dolby 5.1 or Surround 2.0 options. Remastered in THX, the film looks outstanding, with the dominant blue of the palette combining with the ambient noise of the ocean deep, resulting in an otherworldly aquatic atmosphere supplanting your living room. The lack of support for HDTVs is the set's only major failing, and will certainly raise the ire of high-end home theater enthusiasts; but for most of us, the pristine transfer to DVD is more than adequate. In addition to optional subtitles in English or Spanish, one of the most beguiling features of the film itself is the scene-specific text commentary. More effective than any audio commentary I have ever heard, this option efficiently (and entertainingly) conveys technical and anecdotal information without divorcing the viewer from the experience of actually enjoying the film, as audio commentaries by their very nature do. Since we are able to read faster than we talk, it makes sense to convey information in this manner for a film with so much detail and technological prestidigitation behind the scenes.

Under Pressure

In addition to three theatrical trailers and a 10-minute promotional featurette, the set includes Under Pressure, an hour-long documentary on the making of the film. Made in 1993 to accompany the special edition re-release of the film, this revealing feature is matched only by Fear of God, the BBC-produced documentary on The Exorcist: Special Edition DVD, in terms of depth of information and apparent journalistic integrity. Under Pressure details the innumerable hardships endured by cast and crew alike, resulting in The Abyss being dubbed the "toughest film shoot in history." What's most refreshing about the documentary is its candor — it does not shy away from James Cameron's draconian methodologies and the tensions between director and cast that developed, including the incident that prompted actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to storm off the set. The documentary also frankly addresses the film's weaknesses, and allows those involved to respond. It's a refreshing change of pace from the standard "extended commercial" approach most "making-of" featurettes inevitably become.

The Abyss In-Depth

In addition to the film (films, really) and the documentary, the majority of the extras are integrated in the "Abyss In-Depth" section, which guides viewers through the well of features contained on the second disc. Viewers are taken through all 28 chapters of material, starting with Cameron's original treatment through excerpts of various drafts of the screenplay to the complete shooting script. That's right — the entire screenplay is available, and not just for DVD-ROM users (who can also read the screenplay and play three included games). Whether anyone would actually sit and click through the entire screenplay for a three-hour film is totally beside the point — the point is that everything I have just mentioned comprises only the first three chapters (chapter one being the table of contents, chapter two the overview). There are also options to view only the information pertaining to the production itself or the various "mission components," including the DeepCore set, various submersibles, and the alien creatures.

Much of this material is presented textually (but legibly), interspersed with hundreds of photos and multimedia clips of the cast, crew, and production. The cumulative result is the most detailed assemblage of production information ever included on a DVD. The information underscores the enormous technological innovations necessary in order for the film to succeed, from the custom design of the dive gear itself (the helmets were fitted with communications devices that allowed for the first recording of undersea dialogue) to the most complicated effects shots in the film. Equal parts scrapbook and production journal, the "Abyss In-Depth" may explain the techno-wizardry that went into the film, but it does not strip away the mystique.

The Imaging Station

While the "In-Depth" navigation options are helpful and fun to play with, they probably won't appease those jonesing for the quick-fix multimedia orgy that DVDs have come to promise. Those addicts need look no further than the "Imaging Station," which collects the bulk of the A/V material seeded throughout the "In-Depth" sections. This collection of features dissects many of the film's most technologically daunting elements, including a multi-angle look at the creation of the "pseudopod sequence," which is generally regarded as the first truly refined use of CGI effects, as well as glimpses of the more traditional special effects employed. Of these segments, perhaps none is more impressive than the time-lapse footage that compresses the months-long construction of the DeepCore set (in an uncompleted nuclear tank in Gaffney, South Carolina) into seven minutes. Set to Alan Silvestri's stirring score, this montage showcases like no other feature the sheer scope of the production, particularly when you witness all those months of handiwork drown in the 7.5 million gallons of water necessary to fill the tank.

Other highlights from this section include footage from the surface photography, demonstrations of the rear projection used to incorporate live action with miniatures, and the actual real-time footage of the crane-crash sequence, which was shot on miniature at 120 frames per second to enhance the dramatic effect. Suffice to say, the effect paid off — contrasting the "real" footage with its presentation in the film is as close to a definition of "movie magic" as I can conceive. "The Imaging Station" is capped off by the inclusion of the 20-minute special effects reel that was sent to the Academy, and that gives a cue-by-cue breakdown of how most of the film's effects were created.

Dive In

As The Abyss plumbed new depths of technical filmmaking, so too does the special edition DVD release of the film strike new ground for its medium. While the whole package may flirt with excess (lack of enhancement for widescreen TVs notwithstanding), its respect for the details that go into the making of a monumental film result in this set being a wet dream-come-true for cinephiles, technogeeks, and DVD freaks alike. While one can certainly critique the movie's narrative overindulgence, the production itself remains an awe-inspiring and unforgettable cinematic experience. Once one has looked into this Abyss, the film will never be the same again.

Ben-Hur - 1959

By patterning his pod race in Star Wars: Episode I after the chariot race from William Wyler's 1959 production of Ben-Hur, George Lucas all but confirmed that the climactic scene has become a part of film lore. Choreographed by legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, the 15-minute race anchored this grand 212-minute epic that's one of the best ever to come out of Hollywood. Ben-Hur won a record 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director (Wyler), Actor (Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur), Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim), Cinematography, Music Score, Costume Design, Film Editing, and Special Effects. Now, freed from the cramped distortion of TV-formatted versions that expanded to widescreen only for the chariot race, it emerges as powerful as ever on DVD. And the special effects are still surprisingly effective.

A More Secular Tale of the Christ

Based on a novel by Gen. Lew Wallace, subtitled "A Tale of the Christ" and shot in Rome, Wyler's adaptation manages to walk a steady line between religious spectacle and secular epic. Even Heston isn't as hammy as usual in his role as a wealthy Judean unjustly sentenced to the galleys by his childhood friend, Messala (Stephen Boyd) — who has returned to command the Roman garrison. But character wins out, and Ben-Hur's heroics in saving the fleet commander (Jack Hawkins) earn him his freedom and a chance for vengeance against Messala in the Jerusalem circus. Though the film begins with the wise men paying tribute to baby Jesus in Bethlehem and ends with the Crucifixion, the entire middle focuses on the Roman world and Ben-Hur's quest to find himself and his imprisoned mother and sister. We learn from the "making of" feature that Wyler, a Jew, wanted to make a film that would appeal to people of all religious faiths, and he seems to have done just that.

Epic Extras

Warner Bros. has put together a fantastic full-frame documentary on "Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic," which, itself, has an epic feel to it. The production staff seems to have left no research stone unturned; and the documentary includes scenes from the 1925 black and white version of Ben-Hur (which, surprisingly, featured frontal nudity), early studio and stage stills, photographs of documents and scripts, and even footage of Heston accepting his Oscar for Best Actor. It's wonderfully edited and tells the complete story of Ben-Hur — from the birth of the novel by the former New Mexico Territory governor, to visuals of early playbills for the first staged production and all of Hollywood's attempts to capture the grandeur of Wallace's novel on film.

Twice, we learn, Ben-Hur saved the studio from bankruptcy, and there was a lot riding on the 1959 version. The film used literally a cast of thousands and more than 300 sets — including a 10-square-block set which depicted a Jerusalem that experts said was historically accurate. It was the most expensive motion picture filmed to date, and nervous studio execs flew to Rome to check on the progress almost weekly. Wyler, who was an assistant on the 1925 film, was a stickler for realism and accuracy, and so even the leper colony scenes were shot in an old marble quarry that actually could have been used for the same purpose in 26 AD. Even studio shots were elaborate. For the epic naval battle, Wyler ordered a man-made lake dug so that larger-than-usual miniatures could be used. Years of research preceded the set design, and actors like Heston went to Rome early to learn how to drive chariots. Christopher Plummer handles the narration of this documentary that is so good it will bear frequent rewatching.

Nielsen Ratings

One unexpected, hilarious extra features screen tests from actors seriously considered for the parts of Ben-Hur and Messala. But Leslie Nielsen as the granite-chinned Messala? It's hard not to laugh watching Nielsen try to throw a spear and act like a Roman after seeing him stumble through The Naked Gun and sequels as the bumbling Lt. Frank Drebin. Heston does a fair job on his running commentary, which has a nice "advance" feature so that viewers can cut to the next voiceover. There are also cast/director highlights, theatrical trailers, and an art gallery of still images.

Before Night Falls - 2000

Before Night Falls (2000)

Before Night Falls continues artist-turned-director Julian Schnabel's fascination with creative visionaries who reside outside society's normal parameters. While the woefully underdeveloped subsidiary characters make it less successful than his earlier film Basquiat, Schnabel's new work does succeed in creating a compelling portrait of the film's central figure, homosexual Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas.
The author (played by Jamon Jamon's Javier Bardem) is born in 1943, and spends much of his younger days in an impoverished rural province of Cuba with his mother and her parents. After his grandfather chops down a tree on which Reinaldo has carved a poem, the boy runs away from home to (as he puts it) "join the rebels." A brief newsreel segment about the Cuban Revolution of 1959 is the bridge to Havana 1964, when we see Arenas as an adult, attending university classes and discovering his sexuality. Though Bardem is in his 30s, he conveys the exuberance and slight awkwardness of a revolution-minded 21-year-old with an artistic bent, and this sequence is one of the finest in the film.

Arenas' social life revolves around a group of other gay men, one of whom is his off-again, on-again boyfriend Pepe (Andrea Di Stefano, in one of many underwritten roles), and though the friends are circumspect about their behavior, they are also fairly uncloseted. This relative openness causes problems for them when Castro makes a pronouncement in the late-'60s that homosexuals are counter-revolutionary, and it's not long before Arenas is arrested and his books are banned. He supports himself in prison (and saves himself from physical assault) by writing letters for the mostly illiterate prisoners. The scribe then uses the payment from these endeavors to get a drag queen inmate named Bon Bon (Johnny Depp, in the first of two very distinct roles) to smuggle out the manuscripts he writes in jail.

After Arenas is released from jail, the film takes a Fellini-esque turn as he goes to live with a group of prostitutes and other outcasts in an abandoned hotel. Escape from Cuba is on everyone's mind and the discovery of a bunch of parachute material leads to the construction of a hot-air balloon in the film's most surreal sequence.

Although this mode of escape fails, Arenas eventually gets to New York by virtue of a 1980 Castro edict which allowed people who were homosexual, mentally ill, or had a criminal record to leave Cuba. A decade later, categorized by the U.S. government as "stateless," the writer dies of AIDS.

With a life this full and complex, Schnabel has a lot of material to get through, and Before Night Falls should really have been longer. At its current length, the movie is dramatically unsatisfying, more a "Greatest Hits" collection from Arenas' life than a presentation of his full catalogue. The director has a terrific visual sense, and an aptitude for erotically representing his central character without a prurient leer, but he should have been more confident that the audience wanted to see his subject in greater detail.

Bardem is astonishingly good in the best role of his career. His early parts typecast him as the macho heterosexual stud, but he's recently been veering away from this (he also played a gay man in 1999's Segunda piel, which has not yet been released in the U.S.), and Before Night Falls takes him to another level entirely. Like Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July, the actor is given the opportunity to create a character who goes through numerous iterations, and is utterly believable at every stage.

Other actors don't fare so well. They either suffer from under-representation in the script or from Schnabel's penchant for stunt casting (Sean Penn comes off the worst as a campesino who gives young Reinaldo a ride after the lad leaves home). Di Stefano exudes scads of charisma as Pepe, but this clearly significant relationship in Arenas' life is given short shrift. A similar fate befalls Olivier Martinez as Lázaro Carriles, who befriends the writer after his prison release and sees him through his illness in New York.

Portraying the life of an artist whose method is the written word is very difficult. Other modes of expression are far easier to represent visually and can allow the filmmaker to more successfully connect the audience with the main character's internal life. Bardem and the director work very well together to overcome this substantial obstacle, and Before Night Falls is successful because of their skill at composing and portraying the film's primary focus. It's just a shame that Schnabel neglects to fill in the rest of the portrait.

Kiss of the Dragon - 2001

Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

Forget Romeo Must Die. Please forget Lethal Weapon 4. Kiss of the Dragon is the crossover film Jet Li fans have been waiting for. Combining a cool, Ronin-like European setting with the Asian action star's top-notch kung fu, it's a first-rate adventure on par with many of his Hong Kong films. Thankfully, it also doesn't feature the mid-air wire-fu fighting that's quickly starting to become overused. Here, Li street-brawls with a brutality not seen since Fist of Legend, his remake of/tribute to Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury.
Kiss of the Dragon is much like another Bruce Lee movie, Return of the Dragon. Both films follow a Chinese martial arts expert to Europe where he hunts down a group of ruthless criminals. But whereas Bruce did it for revenge, Jet's doing it for justice. He plays Liu Jian, a crack Beijing cop seconded to the Parisian police to help bust a Chinese heroin dealer. However, the detective supervising the operation, Jean-Pierre Richard (Tcheky Karyo), turns out to also be said smack-peddler's French distributor — a murderous Bad Lieutenant who kills the Eastern drug dealer with Liu's gun, framing the Chinese lawman and forcing him to go on the run.

Revealing these details might be considered spoilerism. However, they all are shown in the film's first major scene, an action-packed 15-minute showstopper culminating in a laundry-room brawl where Jet takes on all comers with laundry baskets, mops, and steaming-hot irons.

Many filmmakers would merely jump to the gunplay, but freshman helmer Chris Nahon shows the same flair for stylish action that marked the early work of Kiss of the Dragon's producer/screenwriter Luc Besson, the fallen dauphin of French cinema. He builds tension by keeping the opening exposition to a minimum: Liu enters a swanky hotel, only to be rerouted to various rooms by secret notes and lurking bodyguards. Complications ensue with the appearance of a dazed prostitute named Jessica (Bridget Fonda), but Nahon lets the suspense mount, letting several nail-biting minutes pass before the guns start blazing.

While an action director with a sense of restraint is rare these days, Besson's script (based on a story by Li) has well-worn tropes aplenty. Blandly played by Fonda, Jessica is a hooker with a heart of platinum, turning tricks only because Richard is holding her young daughter hostage. As if that wasn't coincidence enough, Jessica also just happens to street-walk the same sordid alley that Liu's safe house is on. (You'd think the moneymen at Fox might've sprung for a second location, the cheapskates.) Richard is also straight out of the bad-guy playbook. You never believe for a millisecond that he could be anything but pure evil — the first glimpse viewers catch of him, he's beating a suspect to death with his bare hands.

Karyo, however, deserves credit for making his ridiculous character more palatable than written; most other actors would have pulled a Gary Busey and simply started cackling, hollering, and baring their teeth. However, like Tommy Lee Jones in Under Siege, Karyo gives his dirty cop a bit of shading and delivers some hilarious bon mots; when Jessica's daughter asks the part-time pimp if he has any Barbie dolls, he cheerfully replies "All my Barbies are working."

The real surprise performance, though, is Li. Given only a half-dozen lines in Romeo Must Die, he has more dialogue in Dragon than Jean-Claude Van Damme did in his last three films combined. Despite being saddled with a thick accent — which is appropriate, considering his character is from Beijing — Li carries himself with determination and grace. When Jessica's pimp starts roughing her up in front of Liu, the agent's outrage is convincing, as is his all-but-inevitable fury.

But no one's going to plunk down $8 to see Li emote — they're there to see him kick ass, which he does — en masse. Editor Marco Cavé's quick cutting may irk those used to watching Li deliver fisticuffs for minutes on end, but martial arts choreographer Corey Yuen smoothes over the rough patches. Using tricks honed directing such Li classics as New Legend of Shaolin and Fong Sai Yuk, he showcases Jet's ability to simultaneously pummel dozens of opponents. Nowhere does this skill shine more than during the finale, where Li batters an entire Paris police station into paté. After watching this dizzying orgy of hand-to-hand combat, there's no denying this Dragon has got some serious fire.