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There is a scene at the beginning of Romeo Must Die that announces its intentions pretty clearly, in which a Chinese man sits in a night club watching two gorgeous women on a dance floor french kissing. There is no reason for this scene at all, except perhaps to establish that this is, in fact, an exploitation film. After all, the fewer actual merits an exploitation movie has, the likelier it is to have a lesbian scene of some variety in it. From almost the first scene in the movie, Romeo Must Die wallows in exploitation traditions: it's a kung-fu movie and a blaxploitation movie all rolled into one. But it isn't very good.

The plot of Romeo Must Die is more or less borrowed from Shakespeare. What the hell--the story has already been done in stranger settings than this one. Jet Li plays a former policeman who is doing time for a crime he didn't commit in order to save his gangster father. Word reaches him that his brother has been killed in a gang war between Asian gangsters and Black gangsters. He escapes and goes to San Francisco to investigate. There, he meets and falls for the daughter of his father's rival. During the course of the investigation, he is crossed and double crossed, and eventually brings both families down in violent kung-fu sequences. This sounds good enough on paper, but it doesn't work very well for a couple of reasons. First, the kung-fu sequences are poorly filmed and utilize obvious computer enhancement (including some really silly extrapolations of the "X-ray" shot in Sonny Chiba's Streetfighter). This is pretty much a cheat, since the audience is there to see Jet Li kick ass on his own, but on the other hand, Li's Hong Kong films use an awful lot of wire-flying, so what the hell. Second, the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is bloodless and without passion, which indicates that the filmmakers don't care about the characters so much as they care about bodies and bullets in motion. Since, as I have already established in point one, the bodies and bullets in motion are underwhelming, the lack of character development becomes more obvious. Oh, the film has one or two good ideas--the scene where Li uses his girlfriend's body as a kung-fu weapon against a female opponent is pretty funny (he won't hit a girl, you see), as is the football game where Li kung-fu's the entire opposing team (and some of his own team, too). But on the whole, Romeo Must Die is so much less than the sum of its parts that it stands revealed as the shallow exploitation film that it is. Jet Li and his fans deserve better.