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Review
by Kozo: |
After last year’s Legend of the Wolf, you had
to wonder what Donnie Yen would do for his encore. That
previous movie was an overwrought, confusing, but well-staged
action movie with lots of slo-mo shots of Yen aping
Bruce Lee. He gives us the same treatment in Ballistic
Kiss, but he attempts to give us actual feeling
with this movie.
Yen plays Cat, an aimless hitman
who bumps off deserving scumbags with acrobatic flair
and deft precision. On his downtime, he unburdens himself
to an annoying DJ (Simon Lui, who’s back for more smarmy
cameos) and dreams of meeting his ultimate “angel.”
He does, a beautiful young policewoman named Carrie
(Annie Wu). It turns out Carrie’s in charge of finding
the person behind the massacre of the triads, and big
surprise: it’s Cat. Problems arise when Cat’s old rival
James Wong Ka-Lok arrives in HK to broker unseen and
frankly unimportant drug deals. Cat wants James dead,
but James won’t croak so easily. In a strange turn of
events, Cat ends up kidnapping Carrie, and we’re off
on the strangest drug trip/emotional hangover ever seen
on celluloid.
Using a virtual primer of film
geek techniques, Donnie Yen spins a tale of love and
revenge drenched in reds, blues, and splattered blood.
The action is John Woo rip-off central, with more bullets
flying than female underwear at a Tom Jones concert.
Never mind that anyone rarely gets hit, the action only
serves to provide breaks in the melodramatic storyline
of a man in search of the angel in himself, and the
innocence he lost so long ago. Or something to that
effect.
Actually, I’m not sure what
the hell Donnie Yen was trying to say with this movie,
but it’s so romantically silly that it’s either total
garbage or some form of new, post-modern camp style
that will only be appreciated in the year 2036. Yen
goes so over the top in this film that he enters orbit
and circles the galaxy for a second pass. Ballistic
Kiss could be a total parody if Yen weren’t so bent
on showing you that he FEELS this stuff. There IS true
poetry in this character of Cat—such that the world
moves in slow motion and little nuggets of wisdom like
“nobody is innocent” apparently rate as philosophical
axioms.
Everything about Ballistic
Kiss screams “ACTION! DRAMA! COOL STYLE!” The fab
wardrobe is a sure tip-off, where everyone wears black
(probably because it comes in handy at spontaneous funerals).
Carrie is a totally unrealistic character: she’s a cop
that lets a hitman lead her around and dresses like
a Spice Girl to boot. There’s too much gunplay
and not enough toe-to-toe fighting, which was the saving
grace of Legend of the Wolf. The gunfights are
cool and stylized, but there are sometimes mystifying
moments that make you laugh out loud. At one point,
there’s a huge point-blank gunfight where characters
escape without a single wound. Donnie Yen and cameo-man
Yu Rong-Guang engage in another wacky moment: a gun
battle in a confined room that actually apes an episode
of Police Squad!
That Donnie Yen threw this
all together and expected us to be moved is dumbfounding—but
you gotta give the guy credit. This derivative, pretentious,
and embarrassingly romantic flick puts everything on
the line and asks you to believe. Frankly, I couldn’t
believe what was happening. Laugh or cry when you see
this movie. It’s your choice, and you can’t really go
wrong either way. (Kozo 1998) |
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