Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

Kiss of the Dragon arrives as a lean Franco-American action vehicle with Jet Li as a Chinese police officer adrift in Paris. The film's most forward-looking gesture is its casting: Li anchors the picture, Asian supporting players appear without ceremony, and his romance with Bridget Fonda's Jessica inverts the usual Hollywood arrangement of the era. This is mild cultural adjustment, not a thesis. The movie wants to watch Li dodge bullets and apply acupuncture needles to corrupt French policemen, and it does so with a straight face and a minimum of fuss.

Jessica's predicament is grim and treated as plot machinery. She is a coerced prostitute, a hostage, and eventually a patient who needs waking, and the film offers no feminist framing or critique of the exploitation it uses for stakes. The Chinese officer against corrupt French authorities produces a faint hum of cultural friction, but race is never examined with any real intent. The academic reading of Asian masculinity that has grown around the film is an external argument, not something the screenplay bothers to make. The remainder is a revenge plot with good fight choreography and a very practical attitude toward human trafficking.

The picture has no interest in climate, capital, body politics, neurodivergence, or historical revision. Its villains are drug smugglers and crooked cops, not a system that needs dismantling. There is no sermon, no moral instruction, no attempt to educate the audience between punches. Ebert liked it on a simple physical level, and that remains the correct level. Kiss of the Dragon is not a film with a message. It is a film with a needle and a grudge, and in 2001 that was apparently enough.