WAR (Philip G. Atwell). 103 minutes. Opens Friday (August 24). Rating: NN
This is a Luc Besson-style martial arts picture without Besson – it’s got his stars Jet Li (Kiss Of The Dragon, Unleashed) and Jason Statham (Transporter 1 and 2) and fight choreographer Corey Yuen, who worked on three of those pictures, co-directing Transporter.
Statham plays an FBI agent trying to head off a yakuza-Triad war in San Francisco, and Li as Rogue, an assassin with a fondness for surgically refurbished faces who’s in town to rack up a huge body count. Onscreen titles suggest that San Francisco actually has a “yakuza district.” It’s probably near Embarcadero Square.
The story is standard gang war. It’s A Fist Full Of Dollars, Yojimbo and Hammett’s Red Harvest with a big twist ending and some okay fight scenes.
If you can’t find a really good martial arts movie to rent this weekend (I see Dragon Dynasty’s bringing out a new edition of Mad Monkey Kung Fu soon) then you could, I suppose, do worse than this.
But Crank or Kiss Of The Dragon would be better choices.
