Romeo Must Die (2000)

Romeo Must Die arrives at the turn of the millennium with a premise that sounds like a studio executive's fever dream: Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers relocated to the Oakland waterfront, their feuding families reimagined as a Chinese triad and an African-American crime syndicate. The fighting is choreographed by Corey Yuen and performed by Jet Li, imported from Hong Kong to lend the enterprise some credibility. Between the punches there is a plot about waterfront deeds, a football stadium, and a great deal of scheming. It is a martial arts picture with hip-hop in its bloodstream and very little on its mind.

In 2000, a Hollywood action film headlined by Jet Li and Aaliyah, supported by Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong and Delroy Lindo, was a genuine novelty. The screen is populated almost entirely by Asian and Black faces, and the central tension is explicitly a racial one, with two communities at war over territory and respect. The film treats this as genre furniture. Nobody stops to explain the sociology of it, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. Aaliyah's Trish pushes back against her father's criminal business and eventually puts a bullet in the villain, a small deposit on the ledger of female agency. She still spends most of the running time as the romantic prize in a man's revenge story.

The antagonists, naturally, are developers. A magnate named Roth wants a stadium, and the gang leaders want a cut of the franchise. Greed is the engine, which gives the proceedings a faint aroma of class critique without any of the aftertaste. Nothing here concerns the climate, the body, the mind's varied wiring, or the historical record. The film has no interest in reeducation. It wants to show a man kick through a wall and then walk off into the sunset with a pop star. That is a modest ambition, honestly pursued.