You could fill a small junkyard with the films Jet Li (李連杰) and Jason Statham have made separately. Perhaps to cut down on waste, they've teamed up for a single trip to the dumpster. The occasion is War, a title the movie never quite lives up to. Spat or Tiff might be more accurate.
Directed by Philip Atwell, the movie barely utilizes either man's strengths. Statham gets one or two fight sequences (he remains clothed for both) and has dialogue so terrible not even he can trick you into laughing at it. Li, meanwhile, seems to be playing a robot of himself. He barrels dutifully from scene to scene, speaking his halting English with a dispiriting lack of joy. Even his kicks have no crackle. He gives us business when we've come for pleasure.
The screenplay contains a lot of exposition but no explanation. We know this much: the Yakuza and Chinese Triads are at each other's throats over ancient treasures. Li plays a character named Rogue, a psychopath whose pulse never rises. Rogue is also a whore of a hit man – he'll kill anybody on either side of this skirmish if asked. He spends a lot of time with a prissy Triad boss, played by John Lone, who does all he can to take the part seriously ("Revenge is a must!" he snarls).
PHOTO: COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS
But Rogue has no problem causing trouble for the boss. He furtively foments conflict between the Triad and the Yakuza, who keep him on their payroll. Conflict even takes the form of a deadly motorbike chase.
It turns out that Rogue has killed the partner of FBI agent, John Crawford, and the partner's family. Crawford has spent years trying to catch the killer. His ex-wife is still annoyed, and her lines could be from Brokeback Mountain Two: "Look, your obsession with this man has cost you your marriage!" (For what it's worth, the movie is set in San Francisco.)
His marriage over, Crawford chases Rogue from one terribly assembled shootout and swordfight to the next. These scenes are so ugly and rushed that we can't figure out what's going on.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS
No one who's witnessed any of the graceful yet blistering combat in the Bourne movies should stand for action sequences that look like they've been edited with an Uzi.
Fun here is fleeting. Mathew St Patrick, as Crawford's new partner, shows some teasing spontaneity. And Devon Aoki, as the Yakuza head's daughter, has a good scene, holding a knife to one underling and a gun to another, obviously stressed out.
"I just got off a 14-hour flight. I want a salad," she says. "Dressing on the side." The best acting in the whole picture is the confused looks those two dudes give her.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits