Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Philip G. Atwell
Cast :
Jet Li……….Rogue
Jason Statham……….Jack Crawford
When one mentions action movies from the Far East, three names come to mind: Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li. All three have had various levels of success, but compared to their followings abroad the three are roughly the equivalent of a second level action star like Vin Diesel. Considering all three were at the top of Eastern cinema, to be the equivalent of a second rate muscle-head when they were the Asian equivalent to Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger has to be a bit of a comedown.
All three have been trying to bring their inventive and unique action methods to American cinemas in a format easy to digest and none have been successful individually; it took Chan in a sidekick role for him to get the sort of box office success in the U.S as it did for him in any number of films in Hong Kong. Li has been in the same boat, often taking secondary roles, but has yet to reach the same sort of success as Chan. Now while it seems only a matter of time before Fat teams up with Chris Rock in an action comedy, Li has once again teamed up with another actor. This time it’s someone of roughly the same equivalence in War.
Jack Crawford (Jason Statham) is an FBI agent whose partner has been killed by a renowned hit man known only as Rogue (Li). Three years pass and Crawford has dedicated his career to tracking him down in a quest for revenge. When Rogue surfaces in San Francisco, playing both sides of a Yakuza-Triad war, Crawford finds his opportunity for revenge by tracking down the man. What follows is a convoluted and hard to follow hybrid of a detective thriller and action film with plenty of martial arts to match.
While the action aspects of the film are terrific, as the hand to hand combat and gun fire sequences are well worth the price of admission, the film itself tries to do a number of things and doesn’t do them well. There’s a top notch detective thriller inside this film waiting to come out, but the film tries too hard at times. It feels much more like a television show with a detective in it as opposed to the big screen, which isn’t shocking considering Philip Atwell is making his cinematic debut after a history on TV. He does wonders with the action sequences, bringing out some quality moments that rival any action picture this year, but beyond that it can be maddening to watch the film’s plot. It’s so ham-fisted and the dialogue so awful at times that it becomes unintentionally hilarious.
And it’s a shame, really, became Statham and Li are wonderful together. Li is cool and calm to a degree that’s impressive; he’s a killing machine that has no qualms with what he does. Statham brings out a lot of the qualities he has shown in Crank and The Transporter series as a man pushed to his breaking point. Crawford has a delightful madness to him; he’s given up his marriage, his happiness and part of his sanity to take down Rogue. Juxtaposed against one another they have an intriguing combination. The fight scene at the end between the pair, though short in time, is interesting to see and fascinating to watch.
What becomes burdensome is that by the end Atwell doesn’t really seem to know what he’s going for. He throws in several different plot twists near the end that radically change the film for the worse, as well as an ending that doesn’t fit. War would’ve been the sort of film that introduced Li several years ago; now it’s just another in a line of films that make people want for the days of Once Upon a Time in China.
