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Romeo, dead on arrival

Mark Bradshaw

You don't need to wait too long to know what Romeo Must Die is all about. In a spectacular opening sequence, you have the hero, Han O'Day (played by 36-year-old star Jet Li), hanging from a rope in a Hong Kong prison, seemingly helpless, with four guards below him just in case.

Just in case, hell -- seconds later, all four guards are down for the count and Li hits the ground running. All the way to Oakland, USA, where his younger brother has been murdered in course of a skirmish between Asian and black gangs fighting for control of the waterfront.

The story, from there on, revolves around Isaak O'Day (Delroy Lindo), all set to get out of gangsterism and go legit. With him are daughter Trish O'Day (hip-hop diva Aaliyah making her screen debut and looking cute as a button), son Colin (D B Woodside) and factotum-in-chief Mac (Isaiah Washington).

In the red corner, please find Chu Sing (Henry O), son Po Sing (Jon Kit Lee) and chief factotum Kai (Russel Wong).

Both gangs want to buy up waterfront properties, which they can then sell at a hugely inflated price to NFL development magnate Roth (Edoardo Ballerini). Who wants to build a stadium.

And then, the O'Day crowd bumps off Po Sing, brother and ex-cop Han breaks out of the Hong Kong prison and all hell busts loose. So much for the story.

Now pray tell, what's the name 'Romeo' doing in the title? If the moviemaker's intention was to portray the O'Days and Sings as modern day Montagues and Capulets, with Han and Trish playing Romeo and Juliet, he misses the mark by a country mile-and-a-half. Romeo -- if you agree that Shakespeare has a patent on the name and all that it implies -- is about romance. Scarcely an hour after making the acquaintance of the masked Juliet, he's climbing to her room. And performing his loverly duties to such good effect that when it comes time to quit, he reduces Juliet to 'Oh, don't go' sighs.

Cut to the present. Where Romeo Sing and Juliet O'Day are so chaste in their romance, they are positively Victorian. The heights of romance are reached when they share an ice cream cone, the heights of passion touched when they hug. Ugh!

So the flick is not an updated, interracial Shakespearian love story. What is left, is a hard-boiled gangland film on the lines of On The Waterfront. And again, the director -- famed cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, who worked with Jet Li in the latter's Hollywood debut Lethal Weapon 4 and now making his directorial debut -- misses that particular bus as well. Again, by a mile and a bit.

An action film does not need good acting. But it must have great action. So how does RMD rate in this regard, with Hong Kong ace Corey Yeun choreographing the stunts? There are, admittedly, sequences that could give Matrix a complex. Like the opening sequence. Or the one in which he uses a water hose to subdue the villains. Another -- you see this, you come away thinking Li is in a class of his own when it comes to foot-fighting -- where he goes airborne, twirling like a helicopter propeller gone mad as his feet dropkick five villains into oblivion. And there is, spectacularly, the scene where Li uses Aaliyah as a human nunchaku (for those who have seen Jet Li in the Shaolin Temple series, this scene is reminiscent, in its stylistics, to the sequence in The New Legend of Shaolin, where he fights off a mob with his baby strapped to his back).

But, at the end of it all, you've got to figure that the writer (Eric Bernt) and director didn't give Li full scope to show his skills. Li -- like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan -- is best at the kick-butt action sequences, but there are too few of them in this film to really showcase the talents of the martial arts star. Worse, the director dreams up this stunt of switching to X-ray mode in fight sequences, to show you how and where a victim's bones have been broken. Big deal, I'd much rather see Li break those bones, once more, in slow motion -- the visual gimmick actually detracts from the fight sequence that it is supposed to enhance.

Aaliyah Houghton is pretty. And a mean warbler. The song Try again, from the movie's soundtrack, created history of sorts when it hit number one on the Billboard charts without being sold as a single. Aaliyah has four songs in this flick, and her voice is nicely offset by the minor chords and bass rumbles, in classic hip-hop style.

There's also a bit of comic relief, both in throwaway one-liners and in the cameo role of Anthony Anderson as one of O'Day's hitmen. But overall, you've got to say that Romeo Must Die tries to keep one foot on the romantic stool and another on the gangland broil, and falls somewhere in between.

Credits
Producer: Joel Silver
Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak
Script: Eric Bernt (based on the story by Mitchell Kapner
Starring: Jet Li, Aaliyah Houghton, Delroy Lindo, Russell Wong, Isaiah Washington, Henry O, Anthony Anderson, Edoardo Ballerini, DMX, Jon Kit Lee, D B Woodside

External link
The Romeo Must Die official website