Quotes of the Day
Casting a Hollywood action movie these days is like the old ritual of ordering Chinese food: choose one from column A and one from column B. In column A is a martial-arts star imported from Hong Kong; in column B, a rising young African-American, usually a hip-hop performer or stand-up comic. Studio bosses have decided that the ideal action recipe, like a good Sichuan dinner, is a mix of flavors, spices and colors. And where are the white stars? Don't need 'em in the new East-West rainbow coalition. To get into a decent fight film, Caucasian actors may soon have to petition the U.S. Supreme Court with an affirmative action-movie suit.
The current trend began with the teaming of Jackie Chan and comic Chris Tucker for 1998's Rush Hour. That amiable caper took in $141 million at the North American box office, and its 2001 sequel did even better: $226 million. Hollywood needed no further goading. It paired Jackie's pal Sammo Hung with Arsenio Hall for the TV drama Martial Law, which had a healthy two-year run. And it has put Jet Li, the little dynamo from Beijing, in the company of rappers: Aaliyah in the 2000 hit Romeo Must Die and now DMX in Cradle 2 the Grave.
There's nothing new or particularly progressive in the current casting formula. Minority groups have been in Hollywood B movies since the black infant Allen (Farina) Hoskins joined the silent-screen Our Gang troupe in 1922. And though Asians can be glad they've gained leading-man status after years in the standard martial-arts Yellow Peril role—a kind of Kung Fu Manchu—the studios aren't exhibiting any social enlightenment in pairing them with blacks. Producers are just trying to make films with relatively inexpensive stars that will appeal to disparate markets: half-price actors for, potentially, twice the audience.
Often these teamings make more sense as marketing ploys. As movies, they tend to be a tired jumble of stereotyped humor and steroidal fight scenes. At least there's something tonic about the films Li has made in the West. His character is so solid, so stolid that cross-cultural jokes fizzle around him; producers have stopped trying to turn him into a smiling Jackie type. And since his mission is not to learn American ways but just to catch the damn villain, a Li movie can get down to basics: punch, kick, pummel, kill.
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Cradle is Li's best Western film. In part this is because producer Joel Silver and director Andrzej Bartkowiak have fun ornamenting the action formula; the climax has four burly fights occurring simultaneously. It's also because Li doesn't have to do the heavy plot lifting. His co-star gets that task.
DMX (Dark Man X, née Earl Simmons) has a few platinum CDs, including It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, and a tattoo on his back that elegizes his pet dog. Here he plays Tony Fate, a gentleman thief whose latest heist, a handful of black diamonds, gets him in trouble with some mean malefactors (Hawaii-born Mark Dacascos and Kelly Hu). The black diamonds turn out to be plutonium pellets that could Destroy the World. DMX has charisma enough for the job, performing tough scenes and teary ones with equal facility.
Li, with his pocked skin and petite size, still commands awe with his stunts. On an apartment-house roof, he declines to take the elevator to the ground floor; he drops down the side of the building, one floor at a time, by grabbing onto successive balcony ledges. Later, he disarms an opponent with the fancy footwork he's displayed since his days as a People's Republic teen idol; it's the look-Mao-no-hands routine, in which he does a soft-shoe number on a bad guy's belly. Finally, Li has a face-off against another champion martial artist as he and Dacascos briefly battle it out inside a ring of fire.
Though not yet 40, Li has been making action films for 24 years—longer, for example, than Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the U.S., he's a reliable earner in medium-budget action movies. But as he showed last year, Li may need a Chinese director to bring out his own regal steeliness. In the Zhang Yimou hit Hero, he was more than a solemn killer. Radiating grit and elegance, he fully embodied the film's title. And nobody called him Bruce.
- Richard Corliss
- Hollywood's new color coordination: mix a Chinese action star with an African-American actor