Jet-ting to Paris? Oui!

He was a star of the people's republic wushu team at 11, a star of the mainland hit The Shaolin Temple at 16. At 25 Li Lianjie came to Hong Kong, got the name Jet Li and brought a ferocious stateliness to such martial epics as Once Upon a Time in China and Fong Sai Yuk. At 35 he played in his first big U.S. film, Lethal Weapon 4, and showed Mel Gibson how real men fight: with stern grace and fatal feet. His debut as a Hollywood star, in Romeo Must Die, took in $100 million world- wide. He has just signed a deal with Miramax Films worth $10 million a picture. In China, movie stars are called film workers. In America, Jet Li is what they call a player.

Are there any worlds left to conquer for this stolid star? Apparently one: France.

Kiss of the Dragon, a brooding, bustling action film that premiered in the U.S. a few weeks ago and opens in Hong Kong and other Asian outposts next week, is Li's surprising detour de France. It imagines that Liujian (Li), a detective from the PRC, has come to Paris to track down some very bad folks. He soon learns that the worst baddies are in the Paris police force. Inspecteur Richard (TchEky Karyo)who kills for profit, for revenge and, sometimes, just for funframes Liujian for murder, then realizes that his patsy has a copy of a videotape showing whodunit. Liujian hooks up with an American, Jessica (Bridget Fonda), whom Richard has forced into prostitution and drug addiction, and whose daughter Richard is holding as collateral. He's mean! But not resourceful enough to overcome the fighting skills and wire work of one determined Chinese man.

The film is that rare bird: a true tricontinental production. Li and his favorite collaborator, action choreographer Corey Yuen, represent Asia; Fonda and screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen fly the Stars and Stripes. But the secret ingredient is Luc Besson, the French auteur (Nikita, The Fifth Element) who produced Dragon, wrote the story, set the dark, violent tone, signed French music-video ace Chris Nahon to direct and chose Karyo, the angular menacer who shone in Nikita, to play the spuming villain. The film's other star is Paris. Like any self-respecting thriller set in a famous city, Dragon stages action scenes in many local landmarks: the MEtro, a bateau mouche, the gorgeous Gare de l'Est, the Regina Hotel and the Paris sewers.

The sewer chase should alert you that Dragon is a distant descendant of Les MisErableswith Liujian as Jean Valjean, Richard as Javert, Jessica as the prostitute Fantine and Jessica's daughter as Cosette. What's missing here is any attempt at literacy; the script's garish dialogue seems less written than spray painted. Richard spouts a lot of generic tough-guy dialogue ("Bring him to me alive; I'll kill him myself,") while Liujian barely speaks at all ("I'm not your type?" Jessica poutily asks him, and our monastic hero replies, "I don't have type.")

Maybe this doesn't matter. Nobody goes to hear an action movie. Everybody wants to see Li in action. So watch him defeat bad guys with the tools of domesticity: a mop, a bale of laundry and (ouch) an iron. Gasp as he kicks a billiard ball out of an end pocket, then swats it, cricket-bat-style, into a villain's cranium. See him use a desk drawer as a truncheon. He sneaks past a sentry's guardhouse outside the evil inspecteur's police station and, just to show he can, he rams his foot through his guardhouse door, neatly kicking the sentry in the groin. Inside, he chances upon 20 martial-arts students armed with clubs. Not a problem: he levels five of them with five quicker-than-the-eye maneuvers. At the end, he faces off against a tall, blond, muscular baddie who does five fast handsprings toward Liujian. Li sees his move and tops it with a triple twist that breaks the guy's neck. Nice.

It'd be nicer if the film let us see its lithe star work his martial artistry, and not chop it into minute bits of film. Nahon seems not to know that Hong Kong action fighting is dancing and, like a Fred Astaire number, it needs to be shot in relatively long takes. When the Chinese chop things up, they toss them in a wok and eat them.

Still, Dragon does have a strong kinship to Asian melodramas. The sinister inspecteur is in the '90s Hong Kong movie tradition of Danny Lee's defective detectives and Anthony Wong's beastly cops. Li uses chopsticks as surgical probes (martial-arts stars have done that for decades) and hurtles away from a gigantic fiery explosion (the capper to many a scene in Ringo Lam's heroic-bloodshed films). Li went to a new continent but is up to the same old mischief. He's like the American who goes to Paris and dines at McDonald's.

In the U.S., Kiss of the Dragon opened to slightly softer business than Romeo Must Die. This has less to do with the quality of the two films (Dragon is much preferable in atmosphere, directorial skill and the climactic face-off) than with the featured player. Nothing against Fonda, who still has the most wickedly flirtatious mouth of any Hollywood actress. But Chinese action stars have succeeded with the American public only when their co-stars are African-American. Jackie Chan had his one big U.S. hit, Rush Hour, with the black comic Chris Tucker; the love interest in Romeo Must Die was the hip-hop thrust Aaliyah.

Jet Li may have had fun in this Parisian romp, but you can bet his commercial instincts will send him back to the 'hood.