War (2007)

Philip G. Atwell's directorial debut arrives with a title that promises more than it delivers, which suits a film eventually renamed Rogue Assassin in several territories to avoid confusion with other pictures called War. The picture is a brisk revenge thriller. Jason Statham's FBI agent chases Jet Li's assassin through a turf war between Triad and Yakuza factions in San Francisco. The cast is genuinely polyglot, drawing on Chinese, Japanese, Korean-American and Latino performers, and the international crime setting makes that mixture feel earned instead of imposed. Nobody stands around explaining what the demographics signify. The ethnicity is texture, not thesis.

There is no sermon here. The film has no interest in climate, in class, in the body, in the mind, or in the historical record. It has interest in swords and fists. A woman appears, briefly, and is not asked to carry an argument. No character wrestles with identity in any register a modern audience would recognize as a statement. The violence is the point. The violence is efficient.

A competent, joyless genre exercise, this one. Critics met it with a fourteen percent approval rating; audiences greeted it with a shrug of a B grade. It exists to fill a weekend and a DVD shelf, and it does so without insulting anyone's intelligence or flattering anyone's politics. There is something almost restful about a film this indifferent to the conversation. It kills, it betrays, it ends. The result is a work of near-total ideological silence, which in 2007 was its own modest achievement.