I’m not stupid. I knew it would be, uh… problematic. “Probaly unwatchable” is I believe how I pre-described it to friends. But I figured as long as it stars the team of DMX and Kris Kristofferson I’m gonna get something out of it.

True, DMX has failed to deliver on the promise I thought I saw in him when I first saw BELLY. He seems to have pretty much lost his mind (up in here, up in here) and is not above making cameos in unwatchable DTV garbage in order to pay the legal bills for his poor driving, impersonating of federal officers and lack of dog feeding. So DMX alone is not a selling point.

But teamed with Kris Kristofferson? Blade’s mentor? FIRE DOWN BELOW’s villain? Mohammed Ali’s white cohort in the TV movie FREEDOM ROAD? Guy who should play me in a movie if Nick Nolte is not available? Could the creators of the albums ‘The Silver Tongued Devil and I’ and ‘It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot’ really be standing side by side, weilding their guns in a fortress of flames and sparks?

That is a hell of an odd couple there. Those two names above the title sold me. They didn’t even need to bother with that terrible photoshopping, they already had me.

But badly photoshopped covers are promises, and like politicians, DTV movies never keep their promises. If the two bodies who had DMX and Kris Kristofferson’s heads attached to them on this cover ever passed each other in the hallway outside the photography studio then that’s more of a relationship than X and Kristofferson have in the movie. They are not a team, not in any scenes together, I don’t think they even know each other exist. The actual main character of the movie is Detective Travis Roundtree (Ameer Baraka, not pictured). DMX doesn’t show up until 23 minutes into the movie and it’s unlikely he shot for even a full weekend. He mostly just quotes the Bible menacingly and plays pool in one part.

The good news is that Kristofferson really is in the movie. It opens with him and Baraka in a car hauling ass to a crime scene where a guy is about to blow himself up. Kristofferson gruffly rants about Willie Nelson and how he’s better than “Tu-Pack.” He brings up Willie Nelson throughout the movie and also declares Ray Charles’s “Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music” one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

His character is supposed to be obsessive compulsive, he says due to the violence he’s seen on the job and in Vietnam. So he complains about birdshit on picnic tables and uses hand sanitizer alot.

Also he fucks his wife alot, always offscreen through ADR. So for example there will be a shot of the outside of his house and the actress playing his wife makes sex sounds, then it cuts to him in the bathroom with no shirt on.

Now would be a good time to mention that this movie is strictly amateur hour. The opening scene takes place in the day, but when the cut to the exploding car it turns to night. The police work makes no sense – they just go around shooting people and leaving the bodies on the ground with no consequences. There are alot of conversations taking place in cars with greenscreened backgrounds. All of the supporting actors seem like they’ve never acted before. The script is made entirely from post-consumer recycled cliches, so those Kristofferson character quirks are the closest thing to imagination in the movie. Take a guess what the drug lord villain is named:

a) Salazar

b) Santiago

c) Sanchez

(not that it matters, but the answer is b)

For a few minutes I was mildly amused by Kristofferson complaining but not doing anything while his partner Goes Too Far and puts a gun in a guy’s mouth To Get Him To Talk. Kristofferson just acts like his partner torturing people is an annoying habit like snapping his gum or something. But you can only squeeze so much juice out of these cliches by having a gruff old man react to them.

On the positive side it looks like it was really filmed in New Orleans and although it has the filmatic sophistication of DOLEMITE deleted scenes it at least doesn’t look like all the other DTV shit. I have the feeling the movie would have Avid farts and digital shit all over the place if these filmatists knew how to do that stuff, but luckily they don’t. There’s a CGI bullet and some fake digital fire but with the raw, dirty look of the photography and the clumsy crudeness of the thing it mostly looks like it could’ve been shot in the ’80s. And alot of the dudes playing cops and convicts seem like tough guys the director (credited as Mr. V) must’ve known from his neighborhood instead of your usual Hollywood phonies. So at the beginning it has a certain straightforward integrity to it.

But not for long. A story and characters this generic might be acceptable to string together action sequences, but when there’s not much action you got a problem. When Kristofferson isn’t talking the movie is boring as shit.

DMX’s character is some kind of psychotic hitman who wants revenge on Santiago for the death of his sister. While the hero, Roundtree, is having his climactic showdown with the villain all the sudden DMX shows up and fires a bullet into a barrel, which catches Santiago on fire that appears to be digitally enhanced and then erupts into almost a fireworks show. Then DMX gets on his motorcycle and drives away and nobody seems to wonder who he is or think there was anything unusual about what just happened. To be fair, I’m sure all kinds of crazy shit happens in post-Katrina New Orleans, maybe this sort of thing is not that surprising.

But the girlfriend of the villain, who is now the girlfriend of the hero, says that “It’s over,” and I guarantee you’ll be as relieved as she is.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike

What’s historic about this one is that it’s the first picture ever made in English with Jet Li as the star. The only English language picture he’s done in the past is I believe Beverly Hills Cop 4 or one of those type of movies, where he played the bad guy in a couple scenes and then the good guys make fun of him for being chinese. But he was so much more popular in that movie than the movie itself that now he is being groomed to join the pantheon with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Rudy Ray Moore and other martial arts superstars who have made it big in the states. And what better to story give this motherfucker than one by the bard of writing, Mr. William Shakespeare himself, the genius behind Titus and other hits.

Well, that’s what they WANTED us to think. I’ve been reading about this piece for a long time and every single time they call it an update of Romeo and Juliet. I knew they wouldn’t talk like Shakespeare, and obviously there is gonna be some liberties as well as possibly some karate. But I thought it was gonna be a serious, modern karate type of picture which coincidentally happens to be about the warring capulets and whatsits and how Romeo and Juliet meet and fall passionately in love and then the shit hits the fan if you know what I mean, as far as a bunch of karate scenes happen and what not. Of course that would be totally ludicrous. I think it would be very enjoyable.

Unfortunately there must have been alot of script doctors and what not on this picture, who thought they were a regular William Shakespeare, taking out scenes from the original and adding their own. Because what they ended up with is your basic americanized karate picture that has no fucking connection to the original story. There are two families, yes, one black and one chinese. And there is one scene where Jet Li looks in a window at Alliyah, which I guess is supposed to be like the balcony scene. Otherwise, there is no connection. You got no nurses, no apothecaries, no Tibalt or Mercutio types, no forbidden love, and even the rivalry between the two families turns out to be fake. Boys Don’t Cry was actually a much more faithful update of Romeo and Juliet. Hell, Titus was a more faithful update of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, if Shakespeare was alive he would probaly take his name off this project in my opinion, unless he is a very big Jet Li fan but even then he would probaly be very torn.

I mean wouldn’t it be funny if it actually followed the story very closely, but then Romeo starts flying around kicking guys? That is true Cinema in my opinion. At the very least I expected a Romeo and Juliet-like romance, but the relationship here is as cold as a cold beer. They barely know each other, they never even say they are into each other, nobody except a wacky fat guy makes a serious attempt to actually forbid their forbidden love, and at the end all they do is hug.

I mean we don’t even know for sure Jet is straight in this picture. The closest they do to going on a date is Jet convinces Aliiyah to go with him to the night club where he expects everyone to get massacred. Which I guess could be considered romantic I mean what do I know. Yeah, I guess it’s romantic, way to go Jet.

I mean it’s not that bad. There is a couple good action scenes. The best one is where Jet doesn’t want to punch a girl so he moves Aliiyah around like a doll and uses her fists and feet to beat up a gal. Delroy Lindo plays Aliiyah’s dad, an evil gang boss who is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet and never does anything bad or mean during the whole movie. And both Jet and Aliiyah are very likable.

There was a couple things I didn’t understand. Like why do they keep talking about starting an NFL team even though they live in Vancouver, a part of Canada. And how come when Delroy Lindo sees Jet Li he says, “Is this Han?”, even though he’s never heard of him before. There is also a subplot about how people turn into skeletons when they die, I didn’t get that at all man I guess it was over my head.

Maybe I am too much of a purist when it comes to the Shakespearean works, though. I guess you can’t expect every Shakespeare production to be as faithful and tradtionalist as Titus, Theater of Blood or Strange Brew. But even as a straightup karate picture this doesn’t deliver as much excitement as Black Mask, which everybody and their uncle claims is straight up shit compared to Fist of Legend and all those. Come on you americans, if you’re gonna use Jet Li use him well you are wasting a national resource here motherfucker and he’s not even ours yet.

[ratings]

Like

Unlike