Cradle 2 the Grave (2003)

Andrzej Bartkowiak's Cradle 2 the Grave arrives as the third entry in Joel Silver's informal trilogy of hip-hop-scored martial arts pictures, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a man who has found a formula and intends to ride it into the ground. Jet Li plays Su, a Taiwanese intelligence agent, and DMX plays Anthony Fait, a jewel thief whose daughter has been taken hostage over a bag of black diamonds that turn out to be weapons-grade plutonium. The cast is genuinely multiethnic for its era: Gabrielle Union, Kelly Hu, Chi McBride, Anthony Anderson, Mark Dacascos, Daniel Dae Kim in a walk-on. None of this is announced. The film simply assembles its people and gets on with the business of breaking bones in a cage fight, which it does for ten full days of production. Representation here is a matter of casting arithmetic, not of argument.

What the picture declines to do is more instructive than what it does. It has no interest in instructing us about anything. The villains are greedy men with plutonium and a taste for auctions, not a system, so no critique of capital presents itself. The women in the crew handle themselves capably and are never asked to carry a thesis about it. The setting is a hip-hop-inflected Los Angeles underworld populated almost entirely by non-white faces, and the film refuses to notice this fact, let alone comment on it. There is no historical record being corrected, no body politics, no inner weather of any diagnostic kind. The movie wants to show us a man kicking fifteen opponents in a cyclone-fenced ring and then go home.

As a document of social consciousness, then, it is close to inert, a relic of a moment when an action vehicle could simply be an action vehicle. It opened at number one in North America, made fifty-six million worldwide, and was dismissed by critics as dumb and by-the-numbers. That assessment is fair and also irrelevant. The film is not trying to save anyone. It is trying to fill ninety minutes, and it succeeds at roughly that rate, with the flat competence of a man assembling a bookshelf from instructions he has stopped reading.