Word: dragon
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...sewer chase should alert you that Dragon is a distant descendant of Les MisErables?with Liujian as Jean Valjean, Richard as Javert, Jessica as the prostitute Fantine and Jessica's daughter as Cosette. What's missing here is any attempt at literacy; the script's garish dialogue seems less written than spray painted. Richard spouts a lot of generic tough-guy dialogue ("Bring him to me alive; I'll kill him myself,") while Liujian barely speaks at all ("I'm not your type?" Jessica poutily asks him, and our monastic hero replies, "I don't have type...
...Still, Dragon does have a strong kinship to Asian melodramas. The sinister inspecteur is in the '90s Hong Kong movie tradition of Danny Lee's defective detectives and Anthony Wong's beastly cops. Li uses chopsticks as surgical probes (martial-arts stars have done that for decades) and hurtles away from a gigantic fiery explosion (the capper to many a scene in Ringo Lam's heroic-bloodshed films). Li went to a new continent but is up to the same old mischief. He's like the American who goes to Paris and dines at McDonald...
...Kiss of the Dragon opened to slightly softer business than Romeo Must Die. This has less to do with the quality of the two films (Dragon is much preferable in atmosphere, directorial skill and the climactic face-off) than with the featured player. Nothing against Fonda, who still has the most wickedly flirtatious mouth of any Hollywood actress. But Chinese action stars have succeeded with the American public only when their co-stars are African-American. Jackie Chan had his one big U.S. hit, Rush Hour, with the black comic Chris Tucker; the love interest in Romeo Must...
...many times this week had he gone to see the dragon? Five? Six? Ten? Fitz had lost count. But he reckoned he went to the den almost every night and paid Ton, the scraggly opium dealer with a green-and-blue dragon tattooed on his thin upper arm, 50 per pipe to get him off. He lay there, watching the dragon coil and uncoil as Ton flexed his arms, working to heat the night-colored opium, mixing the paste with Mr. Headache powder and then rolling it between his palms into cylinders. He broke off pieces from the roll...
...pipe dreams. He had come via Thailand from Toronto, where he had been laid off from an Internet magazine. Now, after a month in town, it took a dozen pipes to get to that blissful nodding state, and if he didn't come down to see the dragon at least once a day, he knew he would have a fitful night and a backache the next morning...