Review: Kiss of the Dragon is Jet Li's third movie outside of Hong Kong. This movie is another test for Jet Li to see if he can make it in north America. Kiss of the Dragon is basically a martial arts movie set in modern day France where Jet Li gets to show off his martial arts talents. There was a lot of good and bad points in this movie, our points are from a Hong Kong movie fans perspective so not everyone might agree with our thoughts. We found the story behind this movie becoming more a pretext for action as it went along. There was nothing wrong with the story, it was very simple without any real twists or any interesting events to drawing you in, in other words it was very Hollywood thus empty. None the less there was an attempt made to add that certain level of development to the story with the characters but it did not really work and some of the long should have been replaced by one of more intense action scenes in the movie, cause the action was the strong point of the movie.

There is not a lot to be said about the characters in this movie, out of the entire movie only one character stood out. It was the evil police chief Richard, played by Tcheky Karyo, his character was a little similar to that he played in the French movie Doberman. There was a great deal of improvement for Jet Li in this movie, his English has improved a lot and his acting skills are much better. He played his part perfectly but unfortunately his character was not really interesting and its one you wont remember unlike Leon from The Professional. Jet Li's character reminds us a bit of Bodyguard from Beijing, where he played a special agent who was quiet yet deadly. All the other characters were well played but they generally seemed uninteresting. There was one absolutely terrible thing in this movie this, it was the language spoken. Why would two Frenchmen in France be talking in English or for that matter everyone in France? The same goes for two Chinese talking in English with exaggerated accents. This took the credibility away from the scenes and pretty much shattered the feeling of the scene. Are subtitles really something so terrible that the American public can't deal with them? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was entirely in subtitles and people seemed to enjoy that movie.

When it comes to the action this movie shined, you had some pretty incredible scenes set up. All the fight scenes are diverse and exciting, they tried to make the best use of the environment the scene was shot in and the result was very good. As for the Martial Arts choreography is was just beautiful to watch, Jet Li was simply excellent not to mention some of his skilled opponents. There was some shots with a little shaky camera but its not that noticeable so it never really becomes annoying. There is also a very nice tribute to Fist of Legend, if you've seen Fist of Legend you will notice it right away, it was a real nice touch. You had some Hip Hop soundtrack thrown into some of the fight scenes, we of course found this out of place as it did not really match the rhythm of the fight. It was more there for the north American audience who associate Kung Fu with Hip Hop, it wasn't bad but from an HK perspective it was really out of place. We were surprised at one little detail, the level of violence that is. It was comparable to what you have in HK or Japanese action movies, it is good they did not hold back anything as it would have just hurt the movie.