Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
8/26/07
**SPOILER
ALERT: WHILE I WON'T COME OUT AND SAY HOW IT ENDS, IF YOU'RE PLANNING
TO SEE WAR, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY DO SO BEFORE READING THIS REVIEW**
When
I was a kid, any time I had two cool toys from anywhere near the same universe
(a pair of dinosaurs, two robots, maybe a dinosaur and a robot; hell, any
two things that were roughly the same size...) the single most important
thing that I wanted to see them do was... FIGHT!!! Even when our
childish instincts seek cover behind adult rationality, the debate rages
on: who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman... Godzilla
and Optimus Prime... James T. Kirk and Buffy Summers? And from the
moment a new movie action hero is introduced, he is immediately slotted
into the eternal debate while we anxiously await those rare occasions when
a screenplay pits one action hero against another. Having already
faced Mel Gibson (in Lethal Weapon 4, advantage Mel) and himself
(in The One, obviously ending in something of a draw), Jet Li adopts
his Evil Jet persona to take on The Transporter himself, big bad Jason
Statham in War, a new action fest that's disappointingly light on
Hero vs. Hero action, but redeems itself by pulling one hell of
a rabbit out of its' hat at the end.
FBI
agent Jack Crawford (Statham) and his partner Tom Lone (Terry Chen) have
pursued an international assassin known only as Rogue. Tom appears
to kill Rogue, but later the killer circles around and kills Tom, his wife
and their child. Devastated, Jack turns all his energy to the hunt
for his partner's murderer, but Rogue is a tough man to catch: he's
rumored to have plastic surgery every six months to hide his identity.
Three years later, Jack's lost his family and been reduced to the standard
Movie Cop apartment. But his work seems to pay off when Rogue (now
played by Li) surfaces in the middle of a feud between the Yazuka, led
by Chang (John Lone) and the Triad, fronted by Shiro (Ryo Ishibashi) and
his daughter Kira (Devon Aoki). At first Rogue seems only to be another
hired hand, but soon he's murdering everyone on either side that he can
get his hands on and seems oddly interested in reaching out to Jack.
What is Rogue's real agenda?
Ah,
but therein lies the rub because War is building to about as big
a surprise as I can imagine in a movie of this type: the fact that
it's building to a surprise at all. Screenwriters Lee Anthony Smith
and Gregory J. Bradley play the fairly nifty trick of constructing a narrative
that seems to be just another mindless excuse for action, recycled from
generic parts, when in fact they're building to a crackerjack reversal
that calls into question the very nature of the genre. You can argue
that the double-twist ending is one twist too many (Twist #1 is brilliantly
woven into the narrative and hidden in plain sight the whole time, while
Twist #2 is simply not contradicted by any of what we've seen, which is
not the same thing), but they work together to comment cleverly on the
nature of the bone-crunching action hero. As they say, one man's
terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
It
also comments nicely on the personae of its' stars. Statham has played
a few villains himself in his time (most memorably in Cellular),
and one of the coolest things about him is that it always seems like he
would be the bad guy if only that pesky conscience didn't get in his way.
He's always been more movie star than actor, and I'm not sure I'm buying
everything he's selling here, but as a pure presence, it's hard to imagine
a better fit for the role. Li is probably the best of his generation
of action stars at attracting audience sympathy (as in the underrated gem
Unleashed),
but he's just as good at draining all humanity from his steely gaze, pulling
a black suit from his closet full of them (it's a nice touch that War
actually shows you that closet) and making people drop dead just by smirking
at them. He too is ideally cast, because Rogue is so relentlessly
homicidal that he qualifies as a One-Man Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Too bad that when these two finally meet up, their fight is as brief as
it is brutal.
In
fact, War's violence is so extreme and so ubiquitous, that it's
strangely delightful. Other than the initial plot-launching deaths
of Jack's partner and his family, people die by the dozens (possibly even
hundreds), but as Arnold once famously qualified, they are all bad.
Nothing is off-limits to the demented Rogue, not even strapping a bomb
to a dog's collar, but if you're easily offended, what are you doing at
an R-rated Jason Statham movie in the first place? Alas, the ballet
of carnage also has a distancing effect, and it's hard to get too wrapped
up in the fates of the characters. None of Statham's FBI co-workers
emerge as characters, nor do Chang's wife (Nadine Velazquez) or child.
The evildoers Rogue plows through are entertaining enough: it's always
nice to see the immensely talented John Lone, and I liked the middle-management
incompetence of a lot of Chang and Shiro's top men.
Director
Philip G. Atwell, making his feature debut after years making music videos,
keeps the plates spinning and revels in everything his R-rating allows:
nudity and profanity abound in a way that's increasingly unfamiliar in
our PG-13 era, and some of the deaths are as graphic as they are creative.
He's also got a new toy for the movie's many subtitles, which appear on-screen
written in their native tongue and then “translate” into English.
It's an act of pure, distracting artifice, but it's also kinda cool.
The same can be said of War in general. It's a parade of clever
carnage and screenwriting slight of hand, but it does find time to answer
its' central question, leaving only one of its' stars standing at the end.
Now if only someone would match the winner against Optimus Prime... |
