Romeo Must Die (2000)

Saw it yesterday. Repost of my review at <a href=http://pub4.ezboard.com/bnicktheshadow.html>my board</a>:

PROS

Okay... we all know that the only reason anybody would want to watch this film is to see Jet Li fight... so that's the first thing I'll comment on. The fighting is really good - Jet Li as usual. Fast-paced, plenty of moves, and a cool X-ray cinematographic effect (you'll see what I mean if you see this film) that isn't quite as cool as the bullet wounds in Three Kings, but is of the same kin. The sound editing is absolutely superb - most kung fu films, even the best ones, suffer from having fake-sounding, overamplified punches and kicks. Not so here. So maybe the fights were FX-aided, but it wasn't as blatant as in The Matrix (that film's only really obvious weakness). The only bad things about the fighting I'll mention under CONS momentarily. The gunfights weren't bad either, though in this realm, The Matrix is infinitely better.

The plot isn't really a PRO, but it's definitely on the shinier side of the aluminum foil. It's not much, mind you, but it's already a good deal better than most English-language Jackie Chan films. Speaking of the English language - for the most part, I didn't mind the occasional cheesy line in this film, especially because Jet Li's character isn't supposed to be perfectly fluent. It would be even cheesier if he started churning out super-quotable one-liners like Humphrey Bogart. Back to the plot - I really liked how they ended it. It's definitely a lot better than the average Jackie Chan film, which is immediately what one compares Romeo Must Die to.

Performance-wise, Jet Li is damn cool... but enough of restating the obvious. In addition to him, Delroy Lindo is surprisingly good as the patriarch of the black family, and Anthony Anderson plays the role of "stupid fat guy who gets beaten up a whole lot" really, really well despite the monodimensionality of his character.

CONS

Okay, so maybe I tolerated the cheesiness of a few of Jet Li's lines, but it got out of hand with a lot of the other characters. I won't give specific examples here because I intentionally forgot them. So moving right along...

Big problem here - this film suffers from "the audience won't notice" syndrome, and suffers it chronically. It's most evident from the near-opening scenes in Hong Kong, when the dialect of choice keeps switching back and forth between Chinese and Mandarin. This happened in Tomorrow Never Dies as well as Rush Hour if I remember correctly. Let's face it: sure, most of the audience doesn't notice, but the few that do really see it as just plain stupid.

Another big problem: the hip-hop excess. This has little to do with the fact that I can't stand all this hip-hop "music" - I can't stand techno either, but I loved how they used it in Run Lola Run because it was blended in so well. In Romeo Must Die, the hip-hop just doesn't fit. In fact, whenever Jet Li isn't fighting, this film is almost certain to be like some ****py music video.

Lastly, the death blow in the final fight was way too fake - that was the one big example of FX overkill. I won't fill you in on the details for fear of spoiling the film.

OVERALL

Tough call. This is obviously critically not that great, but entertainment value makes up for it in a big way, so it's really on the fence. I kind of like it, I kind of don't. I'd say that it's extremely average, perhaps even bordering on the realm of "good". If you want to see Jet Li fight, and you've seen all his other films, you might want to check this one out. If you can tolerate hip-hop, more power to you, when dealing with this film. But there's far better kung fu films out there.

Oh, and one last note... this film has nothing to do with "Romeo and Juliet".

You shut up and I let you live, meatball.

I thought the movie looked dumb, but never saw it myself.

Aren't there two warring families in the movie?

I really had no clue what was going on, but when they fight and kill each other, it's real cool.

Why do they call it Romeo must die??
I really don't think it was too much like the actual book.

Which book?

He probably means Romeo and Juliet

Surely not.....

Which one, the Shakespeare play or the song by Dire Straits? (had to break the pattern, ezboard's winking smiley sucks)

Romeo must die is loosely based on Shakespeare's play... (note loosely)
The Dire Straits song rules...
Anyways, I think this movie was rather good, as long as you don't go to see it, expecting to see a film based on the play...

[ryan]

it was better than that modern version of romeo and juliet that came out a while ago.