War

Jet Li and Jason Statham – together at last in a painfully banal cat-and-mouse action thriller with little action and no thrills. Statham, shouty and unmenacing as usual, is a San Francisco FBI agent of uncertain accent determined to take down the killer who took out his partner three years earlier. Prime suspect is Li’s Rogue, a super-assassin for hire who’s playing the Yakuza off against the Triads for reasons of his own. The battle between Chinese and Japanese gangsters (double your Orientalist exploitation!) forms the ill-defined backdrop to the portentous, uninvolving blather that constitutes most of the screenplay – a cliché-sodden farrago credited to two writers but feeling like the work of low-end script-generating software. It gets no better than it deserves; Li and Statham try to look moody but De Niro and Pacino they ain’t. Worst of all, the frenetic, unfocused editing robs the film’s few fight and chase scenes of any potency or tension they might have had; we barely even see Li kicking ass. So, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.