Dracula's Jet Li Studies

During the Covid-19 pandemic I have had fewer opportunities to write film reviews and have as such put more of my efforts towards writing "crash course" articles about various trends in older film.  Most recently I have for whaever reason felt compelled to do a deep dive into the late 90s early 2000s Hollywood career of martial arts star Jet Li and write about these movies in a series of articles.  I call this series:

The Americanization of Jet Li

Post Bruce Lee, every generation has their Kung Fu guy. The late 70s and early 80s had Gordon Liu, the late 80s and early 90s had Jackie Chan, the late 2000s had Tony Jaa, and these days we have Donnie Yen and Iko Uwais but the martial arts star of my generation was the one, the only, Jet Li. Li, who was born Li Lianjie in 1963, rose out of poverty when at a young age people noticed his martial arts aptitude and placed him on the Chinese National Wushu Team. He then starred in a string of Chinese and Hong Kong films during the 80s and early 90s before coming to Hollywood in the late 90s right after the success of Jackie Chan’s “Rush Hour” films showed the studios that there was clear profit to be made from importing Asian action stars to act in American films. The films that followed were… products of their time. The 2000s were an incredibly stupid era of American action movies, the titans of the Schwarzenegger/Stallone era were still around but were clearly in decline but the CGI driven Disney tentpoles hadn’t really arrived yet and there was sort of a power vacuum that needed to be filled and Hollywood was trying to develop a new generation of action stars like Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, and were trying to make them look really cool to these young millennials that were just aging into consumer age. As evidenced by the profitability of the later Fast and Furious sequels this investment would eventually pay off but at the time it seemed pretty lame compared to what had come before and some of these movies’ attempts at connecting with the youths of America seemed pretty clueless.

That’s the environment that Li arrived to and needed to find a way to fit into and damned if he didn’t try. These movies were never what you’d call ubiquitous. None of the movies that Li had first billing on made more than $100 million dollars domestically and I’m not even entirely sure he would have been a “household name” at least outside of the younger generation, but there was a solid decade there where he was part of the landscape of American cinema and I kind of missed it. When Li was first becoming a Hollywood star I was a bit too young to see his mostly R-rated movies and by the time I was old enough for his stuff I was also old enough to know that his Chinese stuff was better so I mostly stuck to that. I did see his PG-13 rated 2001 effort The One, which I liked enough at the time but assume doesn’t hold up and I’ve also seen a handful of his Chinese movies like Fists of Legend, Once Upon a Time in China, and of course Hero but as far has his English stuff my exposure has been limited. So, for my next crash course I’m going to take a look at eight English language movies that Li made between 1998 and 2008 with a goal of examining how the Hollywood of the early 2000s would try to present this Asian superstar to young millennial audiences. It’s an examination that may teach me something about how Hollywood tries to mold itself to talent… or at least give me some dumb early 2000s action movie tropes to laugh at.

Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)



It probably shouldn’t be understated how instrumental the financial success of the movie Rush Hour was in Hollywood’s interest in bringing Jet Li to the American screen. That movie succeeded in helping Chan to break into Hollywood filmmaking not by Americanizing his usual style of Kung Fu cinema but by taking a familiar Hollywood action genre (the buddy cop film) and then adding Jackie Chan to the equation. So in the simplistic minds of Hollywood execs the simple signal of all this was “add kung fu star to a buddy cop movie and that will make him a star” and as such Jet Li was brought in to be the villain in the new installment of one of the most successful buddy cop series of all: Lethal Weapon.

I actually distinctly remember when Lethal Weapon was in theaters for whatever reason. I saw the trailer or something and it intrigued me even though I was ten and didn’t know a damn thing about the series. It wasn’t until much later that I finally started exploring the Lethal Weapon series but I never got around to watching the fourth entry, probably because I found the third movie rather underwhelming. I don’t think I was alone in feeling that way about the third film, it was a critical failure and I think most of the creative team was happy to leave things as a trilogy as they ended up waiting six long years to make the fourth film, which might not sound like an outrageous wait but it only took them two years to make the second film and three years to make the third. And quite a lot happened in the six years between 1992 and 1998. The Lethal Weapon movies had a bit more “attitude” than a lot of the action movies of the 80s but they ultimately were a product of that decade and by 1998 action movies were finally starting to move on. Stallone’s career had fallen apart, Schwarzenegger’s decline wasn’t far off, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal both put out the first of many direct-to-video movies they’d go on to make. But Mel Gibson, who was only ever a part time action star, was still very much in the prime of his career and the Lethal Weapon franchise still had some juice in it and despite the long wait overall, Lethal Weapon 4 was actually by all accounts a rush job. Warner Brothers had done really poorly in 1997 and they needed a safe hit for the next summer so they had Richard Donner work overtime to deliver it.

The final movie does not have a great reputation but after finally seeing it I don’t think its half bad. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover still have that signature chemistry and some of the action sequences are pretty strong. I found the opening scene with the flamethrower guy amusing, the car chase where they drive through the building is reasonably impressive, and the film’s finale mostly works as well. What works a bit less is the supporting cast, which had gotten rather bloated by the fourth film. Joe Pesci probably shouldn’t be in this movie, his character had a purpose when he was introduced in the second film and he probably should just been written out of the series after that and he’s completely superfluous here. Rene Russo also basically has nothing to do other than be pregnant with the Mel Gibson character’s baby and some of the Danny Glover character’s family travails also probably could have been kept to a minimum. Then of course we have Jet Li as the villain, which is sort of the main thing I came to the movie for here and he’s really not utilized very well. His character seldom speaks and just kind of spends the whole movie looking menacing in one of those black kung fu outfits. What’s worse, the film doesn’t really showcase a ton of martial arts from him as he kind of doesn’t have anyone to fight except for a forty two year old Mel Gibson, who he eventually has to lose to. He’s generally miscast in the movie. Li was always more serious than Jackie Chan but I wouldn’t really call him a “menacing” presence and I’m not sure playing a villain suits him. He’s certainly better than… whoever the hell was the villain in Lethal Weapon 3 (who was literally forgettable) but compared to Gary Busey in the first film and the African diplomats in Lethal Weapon 2 he’s not great.

Despite all that the movie does work more than it doesn’t and this was kind of a reminder for me how much this franchise worked in the first place and this wasn’t nearly the decline I expected from it. In fact I’m kind of surprised they never managed to make a fifth movie sometime in the early 2000s and feel like we missed out on something because they didn’t.

*** out of Five