Kiss of the Dragon (3½ Stars)

Liu-Jan (Jet Li) is a Chinese police man sent to Paris to help the French police arrest a Chinese drug dealer. The French police chief kills the drug dealer and frames Liu-Jan. While on the run he meets a prostitute, Jessica (Bridget Fonda), whose daughter is being held hostage by the police chief to force her to work for him.

First the plus: Jet Li is always an excellent martial artist, and the fight scenes in this film don't disappoint. The most spectacular scene is when he enters a police station, alone and unarmed, and fights his way through. He's unfortunate enough to walk into a police karate training room. Do they really have them in police stations?

Then the minus: After watching the film I have no idea why the police chief killed the drug dealer. What did he have to gain from it? There are possible explanations, but if I named them it would just be speculation. The film itself doesn't tell us his motivation.

I was also disappointed with Bridget Fonda's role in the film. In films like this the two people aid one another in a common goal. In "Kiss of the Dragon" the prostitute does very little for Liu-Jan. She can testify against the police chief, but Liu-Jan already has a videotape with enough evidence to do without her.

Overall, this is a pleasant film, but far below the quality of Jet Li's Chinese films.

Success Rate:  + 0.6

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I've had my first feedback on my "Success Rate" for films. It took a while. I've been adding it to my film reviews, if available, for almost 12 months. Maybe nobody noticed it.

There was a complaint about the ratings of two films, "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (+1.2) and "Happy Death Day" (+23.5). "You can't possibly be saying that Happy Death Day was twenty times as successful as Age Of Ultron?"

My success rate is purely proportional, based on the return from the money invested. I could pick more extreme examples. "Titanic" has a success rate of only +8.9, whereas "Supervixens" has a success rate of +168.

Let's take the following examples.

Film 1 has a budget of $1 million dollars and earns $10 million at the box office.
Film 2 has a budget of $10 million dollars and earns $100 million at the box office.

Both of these films have the same success rate, +8.0, but people would intuitively say that the second film is more successful. I see the problem. My proportional rating system is a disadvantage for successful big budget films. On the other hand, I like the way it shows that films like "Supervixens" made a lot of money, relative to their budget. A rating system that simply says how many millions a film has earned would lose that.

The best alternative would be some sort of combination between proportional and absolute income. I could give a film 0.1 points per million dollars earned to give an absolute score, then take the average of the two scores; or I could calculate both scores, then use the larger of the two scores. I don't know. I have all the films I've rated so far in a spreadsheet, so I can play around with different calculation methods until I get results that seem realistic. Until then I'll stick with my proportional rating.