Herald rating: * *
Cast: Wesley Snipes, Anne Archer, Michael Biehn
Director: Christian Duguay
Rating: R18 (violence)
Running time: 117 minutes
Screening: Village, Hoyts
Review: Gilbert Wong
The military genius General Sun Tzu wrote: "All warfare is based on deception." As it happens the same could be said of this film. Director Duguay relies on beguiling art direction and kinetic, frenetic cuts to create a slice-and-dice of a film which serves mainly to recall other and better movies.
Michael Biehn, as Bly the rogue agent and the nemesis of Snipe's hero Shaw, reprises the bug-eyed psycho that his career has descended to post-Aliens. Their predictable face-off, with guns blazing in the clinical corridors of the UN headquarters in New York, has the pair bouncing off the walls and dodging bullets in a sub-Matrix, sub-John Woo dance of death that steals the famed bullet-time special effect with no shame.
As in Mission: Impossible, the movie's small team of UN superspies dons tiny radio earsets as naturally as they put on their underwear. They never shut up, emote wildly and talk, talk, talk ... as if afraid the audience won't figure out what's going on. A justified fear.
Like Terminator's eyeball surgery scene, the hero Shaw performs minor surgery on himself with a scalpel in a speeding car with robotic precision. Playing pick the scene is a necessary distraction because Duguay does not contribute one original idea or plot twist.
Shaw is the patsy, set up for the assassination of the Chinese ambassador to the UN (James Hong), and thereby putting an important Sino-American trade deal under threat. As Maury Chaykin, playing worldweary FBI agent Cappalla, says: "It doesn't take a fortune cookie to see that someone wants to put the kibosh on this."
Shaw becomes the prey of the FBI, his former covert comrade Bly, dozens of spiky-haired triad goons and, in all probability, the succession of people whose rather handsome cars he steals and flamboyantly destroys. Somewhere in all this is Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as the evil businessman Chan, in a role nastily reminiscent of Ming the Merciless in Hollywood's yellow peril period.
Snipes reprises the kung fu moves of the superior Blade, but for all his perspiration might as well be one of the walking dead of that earlier film.
The formulaic movie is saved only by the stylishness with which it is shot. Duguay puts to good use the exoticism and contrast supplied by the gilded modern palaces and basement underworlds in Hong Kong and New York . That may be the problem. Snipes and his cohorts are dwarfed by their settings and made mannequins by the sheer hokiness of the story. A quick turnover to video.
The Art of War
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