War (**1/4)

Jet Li and Jason Statham have made a number of above-average action movies between them. Li has appeared in Fearless and Hero, which incorporated stunning martial-arts sequences into mythical storylines. Statham is best known for the Transporter films and Crank, no-nonsense action films that hardly slowed down and didn’t clutter their stories with sentimentality. Both are non-Americans, which may or may not be why they rarely seem as cocky as American action stars.

Here Statham plays a San Francisco FBI man who obsesses over the mysterious and little-seen assassin who three years earlier killed his partner. He spends the movie hunting down this assassin, who is called Rogue (Li). Rogue has shifted his allegiance from the Chinese Triads to their Japanese rivals and is ensured with the safe transfer of some valuable antiques that are to finance the expansion of the yakuza empire to the new world. Rogue is deadly but seems violent by trade rather than by nature. His motivations seem shrouded. There’s more to the story, but that’s the gist. The movie is quite violent—lots of shooting, lots of cutting—without there being a great deal of action. Li barely displays his martial arts skills. One decent chase sequence stands out, but the movie feels long. The twist ending, which you may or may not guess, isn’t enough to redeem a turgid movie with a higher body count than intelligence quotient. The way Rogue plays off his enemies against one another would be of more interest if those enemies were less one-dimensional.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07