The Art of War (2000)

The Art of War arrives from the year 2000, a Canadian-American action thriller in which Wesley Snipes plays Neil Shaw, a covert operative for the United Nations who does not officially exist until the plot requires him to. He hacks a laptop in Hong Kong, takes a bullet in the shoulder, watches a Chinese ambassador fall at a banquet, and spends the rest of the running time clearing his name. It is the sort of premise that once justified a respectable budget and a theatrical release. Now it plays like an artifact recovered from a vanished commercial ecosystem.

Mr. Snipes anchors the film, and the supporting cast includes Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, James Hong, and Marie Matiko. In a later decade this arrangement would arrive wrapped in commentary. Here it is simply the furniture of an international thriller. The villains are triad members and a duplicitous American bureaucrat. A business mogul behaves badly, which the film treats as a character flaw, not an indictment of markets. Nobody pauses to explain what any of it means. The movie has no interest in the racial dynamics it brushes against, no thesis about gender, no environmental conscience, and no stated position on the moral status of capital. It has a tracking device sewn into a gunshot wound instead.

What remains is a machine for chases, gunfights, and one committed performance from Donald Sutherland, who appears to be enjoying himself in a way the material does not deserve. The screenplay resolves its conspiracy with a telephone lecture about karma, which is as close as the film comes to moral instruction and amounts to very little. Critics at the time were unkind. The box office was modest. The picture now serves as a clean specimen: an action film from before the era when every blockbuster was expected to carry a message. It carries none. It simply runs.