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Hong Kong action cinema has been co-opted by Hollywood. It was bound to happen. The moguls crave a new thrill, a new medium for mayhem, something new to sell to the marks. And here it is, complete with the imprimatur of HK action's Orson Welles, John Woo, who seems to be using his new position as a "name" director to send a little business the way of his friends. In the case of The Replacement Killers, which came out a few months before this, Woo could leave Chow Yun-Fat to his own devices because, limited command of English or no, he is one of the GREAT movie stars. Here, Woo leaves director Che-Kirk Wong to his own devices. Wong, unfortunately, is not in the same league as Woo or Chow Yun-Fat or Ringo Lam or Tsui Hark or even Ronny Yu (did anyone bother to even look at Warriors of Virtue?).

Wong is a workman HK director who is typical of the filmmakers in the second and third rank of HK filmmakers­he is content to ape the first rank, particularly Woo, and cover his own failings of talent and taste with knock-about comedy. As anyone familiar with Jackie Chan movies knows, this is sometimes enough­IF you have someone with the charisma of Jackie Chan and IF the comedy bits are funny. The Big Hit, the first American version of this trend, does not have Chan and it isn't funny and the action bits, well staged though they might be, are strung together with the comedy bits without art or wit or internal logic. This is a tasteless movie, too, which attempts to wring laughs from masturbation, vomit, Jewish inlaws, Hara Kiri, and attempted rape­it is a film which calls to mind John Waters's distinction between good bad taste and bad bad taste. One sits through this ham-fisted tickling in stone silence. The screenplay is wooden, the dialogue is embarassing, and the performances are just plain awful. There is nothing worse than a bad comedy. This is a bad comedy.