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good back-story, and good acting

A Disappointing Continuation

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An avenging cop seeks out his brother's killer and falls for the daughter of a businessman who is involved in a money-deal with his father. Romeo Must Die is a very entertaining action flick thanks to a very good performance by Jet Li and it's really disappointing that we don't see him in great movies anymore and even if we do it's for around 5 to 10 minutes for example The Expendables Trilogy now he is starring only in crappy Chineze movies anyways moving on the movie does have some over the top action but overall it has a lot great stunt work and fight scenes that will steal the show and some really good humor and it's a pretty good movie which is mostly remembered for Aaliyah since she died one year after this movie.

To sit through ROMEO MUST DIE is to go back to that (mercifully) short period when it seemed like every movie was aping THE MATRIX. But this one doesn't have parody going for it. When Jet Li isn't creatively using the props around him to kick some bad guy ass, he's bouncing drop kicks off of walls and nailing ballet scissor kicks in midair. It's East-meets-West insofar as the really obvious wire-fu meets lots of American action-movie gunplay. Throw in the awful hip-hop soundtrack and sore thumb Isaiah Washington, and you get the gist. And were it a little more lighthearted, it might actually be fun. But the quasi-Shakespearean business dealings (Romeo, Machiavelli, it's pretty on-the-nose) come off extremely forced. It's certainly not the worst I've seen, but it's . . . well, it's not great. Although I did crack up at the suitcase machine gun trick they cribbed from GHOST IN THE SHELL.Man, this was lame.4/10

When Jackie Chan faces off against five or six tough guys at the same time what makes him so much fun to watch is the way he beats them up with chairs, ladders, pool cues or steering wheels and needs no visual tricks and no special effects. His talent is that he does it all himself.That was my first problem with 'Romeo Must Die' which doesn't star Chan but Hong Kong action star Jet Li and when he faces five guys, special effects allow him to suspend himself in the air while fighting. He needs help from the special effects artists.This trick did work in the 'The Matrix' because we knew that we were inside a virtual reality world. But to watch a guy do this on a football field in a real setting whirling around in the air and kicking people just looks silly.The story doesn't fair much better. It's borrows one idea from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet when Li travels to America and falls for an African-American woman (Aaliyah) whose father (Delroy Lindo) was responsible for his brother's death in Hong Kong. The two lovers don't generate much chemistry because every moment alone is interrupted by a violent encounter. Li plays Han, who was once a cop in the far east. His detective work leads him to a plot by her father to build a stadium by threatening local merchants to sign over their businesses – or else. Mostly the merchants fall under the 'or else' category and for some reason there doesn't seem to be any investigation into their deaths. Their deaths are quick, violent and there are plenty of them.Li is probably a fine actor in the right movie. He has a genteel face and a calm manner. But those attributes are hidden here in a noisy movie full of broken glass, bone-crunching and an over-zealous rap soundtrack.Maybe I was concentrating on the story too much. In Chan's films I forget the hacknyed story mostly because I go to see his flying fists. 'Romeo Must Die' is a very violent action movie, so violent that is distracts from anything else even when there isn't much else to see.Final Note: Why is it that latest film versions of 'Hamlet' seem to be new and inventive (the best being Branagh's 1996 film) while the latest versions of 'Romeo and Juliet' seem to be tired and silly. Mr. Branagh, perhaps you should look into this.

The death of Han Sing's brother catapults him out of a Hong Kong jail to the San Francisco waterfront, where he vows to find his brother's killers. It lands him in the middle of a three way deal between "businessmen" who will stop at nothing to create a new money making stadium. Han finds help from Trish, a woman with close connections to the mob, and together they work to find their brothers' killers.....One thing that I really can't understand is that this movie was Li's big Hollywood breakout movie, and whilst it's not the worst action movie out there, the Director and star have made some astonishingly good movies since (and in Li's case, before) you really cannot believe that Hollywood gave them this vehicle, its a little disrespectful.And it's down purely to Joel Silver. Now this chap has produced some brilliant movies, he produced my favourite movie of all time, Die Hard. But after the phenomenal success of The Matrix, he became a sell out, and thought that this was what the people wanted.For an athlete like Li, its cringe inducing to see the wire work, it's really bad, and wreaks of Matrix cash in, and the inclusion of the Hip Hop soundtrack disrupts the flow of the narrative.But, it's not a bad film. Li is a brilliant screen presence, and Aaliyah shows that she could have been a huge star. The rest of the cast are good, but you just can't get that after taste of making a quick buck from The Matrix out of your head when watching this.