The official site is here but for some reason I can’t really get the page to come up. YMMV.
Anyhow, this film is an attempt to bring another high profile Asian filmmaker to a more global audience and, of course, to create another action franchise but I don’t know if the grosses will be there to warrant a second film. This was not well-reviewed, to say the least, and couldn’t even surpass the aging (but leggy) Greek Wedding on opening night.
So here we have rogue DIA agent Lucy Liu taking on her boss (Gregg Henry), who apparently stole FBI Agent Antonio Banderas’ wife Talisa Soto (and child), over a deadly nanotech weapon that Henry stole. The FBI gets wind of it and Assistant Director Miguel Sandoval goes out into the field to bring Banderas back to the job; he’s been mourning Soto for seven years but hasn’t lost any of his skills or forgotten anything. The bait? The wife is still alive and after the assignment he will give up the information.
Henry and Soto are now married, with child, but Liu, all on her own, takes down a protective detail transporting the boy and sticks him in a cage in a cave. Henry has used the boy to transport the weapon across the border–in his blood–but for some reason the movie appears to take place in Vancouver. Not just shot in Vancouver, with the Canadian city standing in for, say, Chicago as it often does but the actors tell us it is Vancouver. The producers seemed to realize this little problem (why would a top American government official live in Canada?) and threw a fig on it by having Sandoval say something early on about a transnational task force but this is just one of numerous absurdities.
I mentioned a high profile Asian filmmaker and I didn’t mean just the Chinese Liu but that the director is Kaos (actually a Thai man whose full name is a mouthful: Wych Kaosayananda). The cast is very global: Soto, Sandoval, and Banderas are Latino, Henry’s top man is Scotsman Ray Park (yes, Darth Maul from Star Wars: Episode I and Toad from X-Men), and Banderas’ partner is the Chinese-Canadian actor Terry Chen. But I think the main takeaway I had from the direction was that Kaos is in love with fire or, more precisely, with flame, at least judging by the loving way he films the flames from the many, many explosions.
Liu, who is hardly some FOB Chinese star unable to speak English, has almost no lines; her body counter is higher by far than her word count. Banderas is the same stereotypical world-weary near alcoholic he so often plays. The script was written by Alan B. McElroy and a look at his oevre shows he, like so many in Hollywood, shows up for a payday but doesn’t always feel the need to put his heart into his work.
Recommended for major action or Lucy Liu fans only, but barely
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