_**Jet Li flick in Paris with Bridget Fonda**_

An expert Chinese intelligence agent (Jet Li) is sent to Paris to help the head inspector (Tchéky Karyo) in apprehending a Chinese mob boss at a ritzy hotel, unaware that it’s a set-up. Bridget Fonda plays an American prostitute that “Johnny” (Li) develops a relationship with during the misadventure.

"Kiss of the Dragon" (2001) is a big city crime thriller with the expected overdone martial arts action due to Li. It’s a modern mixing of “From Russia with Love” (1963) with the preposterous action of “The Gauntlet” (1977) and the martial arts of “Enter the Dragon” (1973). It was Bridget’s second to last theatrical movie before calling it a day (although she also did some TV work in 2001-2002, like her final piece “Snow Queen”).

I like the fact that the protagonist, Liu Jian (Li), is confident and an expert fighter, but also very human, even meek, as a stranger in a strange land (being his first visit to Paris). The action is thrilling with a sense of style counterbalanced by some quality drama with Fonda’s character and her situation.

If I were to nitpick, some eye-rolling elements bring down the film’s quality. For instance, Liu Jian storms a police building, opens a door and suddenly enters a dojo full of martial arts guys ready to take him down. Why Sure! Earlier, a British pilot grabs not one, but two Uzis to kill Liu Jian in the swank lobby, shooting up the entire place. Did he really need to cause mass devastation to kill one Chinese man? I'm sure the corrupt Inspector (Tchéky Karyo) wouldn't enjoy explaining the wholesale desolation to the mayor.

Moreover, there are too many hip-hop songs on the soundtrack. I could see one or two (at the most), but they overdid it. It smacked of trying to be too ‘hip.’

The film runs 1 hour, 38 minutes and was shot entirely in Paris & nearby Seine-Saint-Denis, France.

GRADE: B-

The first twist (the premise of the film) is that the lead investigator Richard is a corrupt cop/crime lord and every other cop in the team (aside from foreign-exchange cop Liu Jian) is not only equally corrupt but also super-loyal to Richard as he starts killing his own henchmen cops out of rage. In order to hunt down Liu Jian, the corrupt cops shoot machine guns and kill people in broad daylight in front of the hotel's kitchen staff and laundry workers, creating so many witnesses that it defies belief. This because Richard decided to frame Liu Jian for the murder of a criminal (it's not clear why Richard needs a fall guy anyway) and Jian had the nerve to run away instead of letting himself get shot. So Richard first deliberately creates a witness then instead of letting said witness escape he creates several dozen witnesses who are presumably silenced off-screen and also presumably needs to explain to his superiors how the hotel ended up riddled with bullet-holes while two of his henchmen blew up in the laundry chute.

The action scenes and the performances are competent, so technically it's fine. It would almost be worth a watch as mindless entertainment, but it keeps reminding you how poorly it's written, and the sidekick Jessica is among the more useless and annoying of action movie sidekicks.