If you name your movie War you better deliver, deliver like Edwin Starr or step aside. Teaming up Jet Li and Jason Statham is an inspired first move, it’s like what if someone pitted Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal against each other in the early 90s. Okay maybe not. It’s just too bad that this movie isn’t nearly as cool as it should have been or is far too complicated a story to be of worth to the target audience who paid for awesome martial arts and lots of them.



Statham plays Crawford, an FBI agent tasked with keeping warring factions of the Asian underworld out of the US and off the streets. Li plays “Rogue”, a for-profit assassin that works for whoever will pay for gas in his fancy-shmancy sports car and keep him in designer duds. Rogue kills Crawford’s partner and his partner’s family, and he wants revenge - big time. Rogue’s reappearance signals an escalation between the Chinese triads and the Japanese Yakuza on the streets of metropolitan America (really Vancouver BC mostly). But unbeknownst to everyone Rogue is pursuing his own agenda, but what is it? And who is Rogue really?



Okay that was concise; too bad the film couldn’t do us the same courtesy. I’m a pretty bright guy, if I do say so myself, but even I had trouble following the Rubix Cube of plots, counter-plots, shifting allegiances and betrayals. In this type of movie, if you’re busy trying to keep up with material feeling like there might be an exam on the subject afterwards, you’ve lost. Somebody get to the fight scenes! Or more specifically get to the main fight. Li versus Statham in a donnybrook to end all throw downs. I don’t care about Statham’s failed marriage or Mob boss John Lone’s hot Latina wife and their relationship. Come on!



Although the film is a master class in delayed gratification, it was interesting enough that I wasn’t completely bored and was more or less patient as I waited to see where it was going. There was a twist in the end that I found actually surprising, although looking back I probably should have seen it coming. Still though, any kind of surprise in a movie like this is a welcome one especially in light of the fairly disappointing final fight between Li and Statham. I don’t know what I was expecting, but they take so long getting there, I felt like we should have gotten more.



I’d like to say that action fans at least will get enjoyment from this, but I get the feeling sometimes that director Philip G. Atwell is under the impression that he was making the Asian criminal gang version of The Departed, which incidentally was an Asian film to begin with called Infernal Affairs. War teeters on satisfactory but can’t quite tip the scale enough to make it recommendable. It should make a better DVD choice as a double-headed with Statham’s The Transporter or Crank.