Black Mask

The following description of "Black Mask" appeared in Friday's Washington Post [May 14, 1999]:

"In this English-dubbed version of his 1996 overseas hit, produced by Tsui Hark, Jet Li plays a biologically engineered martial arts fighter who investigates a spate of gang murders. Artisan Entertainment declined to screen this movie for review. Area theaters."

I don't know why anyone would actually need to read a review of a film described as above, since it has a whole bunch of magic words just in the plot description, such as "biologically engineered," "martial arts," "gang murders" and of course "Jet Li." Yes, the man who made "Lethal Weapon 4" not only watchable but giddily enjoyable is back, in a sense, since this film was of course made in 1996. Perhaps we are now going to be treated to two dubbed Jet Li films a year, like we are with Jackie Chan. And perhaps Li will be shown to better advantage in the upcoming ones, much as "Rumble in the Bronx" was not Chan's finest work either.

Jet Li is a total action merchant. For one thing, he is undeniably a handsome man, named as one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People," although one has to wonder how much of an honor this is for Mr. Li when he is listed along with Tom Brokaw. For another thing, his handsomeness works to his advantage normally in his fighting, since he has totally mastered one of the two facial expressions necessary to being the big dog in action movies, that one being "I'll kick your ass." (The other one is "Something terrible has happened which is going to require me to kick some ass," which he is working on.) Still, every facial expression looks authoritative when it's coming out of that face. But the most important thing is how incredibly quick Li is. We saw some of this in "LW4," when he was fighting slow Americans, but not since Bruce, God rest his soul, have American audiences seen someone so effortlessly quick as Jet Li. Even though we all know Jet Li is going to win any and all fights he enters into, it's breathtaking to watch how he dispatches his overmatched opposition, almost casually, yet quicker and more skillfully than I suspect my American eye can fathom. Every single martial arts scene in here is special and riveting, and there is a full complement of them.

Still, like "Rumble in the Bronx" for Chan, this is probably not the best film with which Li could have debuted here, because it has several peculiar and nagging flaws:

• I thought "Commando," the fine piece of thespianism from the mid-80's starring Ahnold, had established unsurpassable records for poor machine-gun shooting by enemies and ludicrously accurate shooting by the hero, but this film certainly gives it a run for its money. While this is OK in "Commando" because "Commando" is a highly enjoyable piece of crap, this is supposed to be a martial arts film. Too many guns.
• A good portion of this movie is devoted to disgusting scenes of acid-charred corpses and the like, which do nothing except nauseate the theatergoer (someone did, in fact, vomit at the AMC City Place 10 screen I saw this at, and I sympathize deeply). I'm all for senseless violence, but it has to have at least some point emotionally, and this stuff makes no impression except that the filmmakers wanted to put something disgusting here and grab their R.
• When people who are dubbed curse, it is unintentionally amusing. Someone needs to actually screen these films for Americans so dubbers can realize this.
• When the director layers random rap songs over certain moments in the movie, it sounds about as appropriate as Chinese opera would have sounded in "Menace II Society," but much more unintentionally amusing. You don't want people being unintentionally amused during an action movie, because then the audience takes the subsequent ass-whompings less seriously.
• Finally, an almost unforgivable sin is perpetrated midway through the movie when we see six guys coming under cover of night at Jet Li with machine guns--and then suddenly it's daytime and Jet Li is in some kind of hideout. What happened? I want to see every single fight involved in a movie when I pay my hard-earned money for it. Since these six guys looked suspiciously similar to six previous guys coming under cover of night with machine guns, I suspect an editing error of some kind. But that's even less acceptable.

Still, the final scene is wonderful; as one of my seatmates noted, "If this [bad] guy had been fighting him all the time, they might have had something." In point of fact, there are a lot of good scenes earlier in the movie, but I can see what he meant. Jet Li on the big screen is a sufficiently exhilirating experience that the movie cannot be counted as a failure. But it could have been much more of a success.

Attractive Man Count: 1.

Attractive Woman Count: 2.

Overall Grade: B-. This is like fine wine in a cracked, dusty bottle.

So, um, can we have another, better one? Lindemann

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