The year was 2000. Hollywood martial arts had finally broken into the big time with the release of The Matrix the year prior and it seemed that every studio suddenly wanted to cram films with as much balletic face kicking that it possibly can. Coincidently, in 1998, Hong Kong superstar Jet Li found his star rising in the west after spending most of Lethal Weapon 4 spectacularly bearing the tar out of Martin Riggs and Roger Murtagh. If only there was some way to capitalise on both these occurrences in one, easy to digest, action epic that merges the two into one, sleek, glorious whole?
Or… how about stuffing both into a mostly unrelated hood movie that also has aspirations of boldly revising William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet in such a way that having Anthony Anderson scream “yo mama” jokes after beating his peers on a PlayStation seems perfectly normal. Welcome to Romeo Must Die, surely the most random actioner of the 2000s.
A fragile truce exists between two seperate fractions of organised crime that exist in Oakland, California, but while the gang run by Isaak O’Day and the branch of the Triads overseen by Ch’u Sing have found common ground over obtaining waterfront property for the NFL, everyone is suddenly put at risk when Ch’u’s youngest son, Po, is murdered after a night on the town. Immediately, everyone’s defences go up, but while Isaak maintains innocence, he’s still smart enough to make sure that his own kids, Trish and Colin, get extra security in case any misguided revenge plot suddenly flies their way.
Meanwhile, after getting word that his little brother is dead, disgraced ex-cop Han promptly escapes the Chinese prison he’s rotting in and makes it to California in record time in order to locate the culprit. However, after visiting Trish first, he soon finds himself bonding with the daughter of his father’s rival, at as the pair are the only people involved who aren’t actually directly involved with all the crime shit that’s going on, it leaves them in an unique position to figure things out.
Of course, between now and then things tend to get a little heated with Issak’s number two, Mac, being openly jealous that Trish is being seen around town with another man. Elsewhere, Ch’u’s enforcer, Kai seems to be happy that old friend Han is around, but the fact that both Han and Trish are constantly being asked to fight for their lives thanks to various assassination attempts is certainly raising suspicion.
Is Issak’s efforts to go straight merely a subterfuge? Is the fact that Ch’u will happily put business ahead of family a massive red flag? Is something going on with Mac and Kai that bears closer investigation? As Han and Trish delve deeper, the latter is inevitably called upon to settle the matter with his various, lightning fast limbs.
Way back when, while I was nestled in a cinema screen during the 2000s, it never truly occured to me precisely how strange Romeo Must Die truly is. I mean, when you actually think about it, the extraordinarily loose adapting of Shakespeare’s most famous play into a urban ganster/action flick is actually one of the least bizarre things about the film that’s never seems to fully decide on what kind of story it’s trying to be. The main bulk of the film takes the form of a crime flick with a predominantly black cast that seems to mostly want to be a glitzier riff on 90s fare like New Jack City and Menace II Society, however, sporadically throughout the plot, the film flirts a bit with romance (even though the characters of Han and Trish never actually “hook up”), stylised action and sequences of wire-fighting Kung-Fu that never even tries to explain why the brawling combatants seemingly weigh as much as a feather as they float unnaturally through the air. On top of that, much like most of the movies made at this time, not only is there some noticable musicians in the cast, but the soundtrack is literally wall to wall Rap/RnB which means the nostalgia factor of a rewatch suddenly goes through the roof.
Amusingly, director Andrezj Bartkowiak seems to have no interest in even trying to merge these conflicting styles in a cohesive whole, and while the script desperately tries to tell a cohesive crime story about duelling families, unsurprisingly it’s the weirder aspects that tend to remain in the memory. For a start, taking Jet Li and dumping him in a fish out of water scenario as he zips around Oakland, pissing off homeboys and snuggling up to Aaliyah, somehow ends up being a weirdly genius move that just keeps getting stranger as it goes along. For a start, one of Issak’s henchmen is played by a typically hyper verbal Anthony Anderson who us constantly getting his chatty ass handed to him by the perky martial artist, but one of those times also happens to take place during a game of football in the park, which sees Li using his floaty fight skills to make everyone look like chumps even though I’m sure that booting an opponent in the face may be an illegal move. However, as the film goes on, the movie seems to be daring itself to put Jet Li in the most un-Jet Li situations as it possibly can and it peaks with the moment where the Hong Kong legend awkwardly dances with Aaliyah in a club as her own music plays while he wears a backwards turned cap that makes the 37 year-old look like he’d get asked for ID in a 7-Eleven.
The cast is pretty damn solid, with Delroy Lindo bringing some much needed gravitas to the story as a mob boss trying to go clean and even though Aaliyah tragically didn’t get much more chances to be on screen, despite the fact that the film doesn’t really explore the romantic part of her relationship with Han possibly because the actress was barely 20 at the time. Still, we also have Isaiah Washington and Russell Wong bringing the threat, and the aforementioned Anderson does a lot with his burly footsoldier role and even though Li looks genuinely baffled about everything that’s going on around him, the dude’s still a damn star.
But all the randomness that clings to this movie like a musk, surely the most out there moments involve those Matrix-inspired fight scenes that stand out amid the gangster plot like a sore thumb. In fact, Romeo Must Die even manages to bang out it’s own version of bullet time with having the screen switch to a Mortal Kombat style x-ray to show bones breaking – but as if to prove my point of the Nateix influence being rushed in, it’s only used about three times throughout the whole film which, to be honest, feels more disorienting than cool. Similarly, the wire-fu is rather weirdly staged and while Li and Wong look cool as they suddenly lift into the air like a pair of brawling Peter Pans, it’ll make absolutely no sense to anyone caught up with the hood based drama that motherfuckers are suddenly fighting in zero G.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia that comes from a soundtrack literally bursting with bangers or the sight of a post-Matrix Hollywood desperately trying to get up to speed, but there’s something weirdly wholesome about Romeo Must Die despite the fact that it’s routinely batshit for the majority of its run time. However, when it comes to curiously dated actioners with delusions of grandeur, prepare to start a minor love affair with this Romeo.
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