Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This film was released to pretty dreadful reviews, but I always felt it was Jet Li's best English language film. "Romeo is Bleeding" is also quite good, but Li has a story credit on this one and the script was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the schlocky team behind enjoyably cartoony action films like the Transporter and Taken franchises. Both of those series are entertaining semi-serious action/revenge nonsense, and that is pretty much what "Kiss of the Dragon" is as well. Li plays a Chinese police office going to Paris to arrest a Chinese drug lord, but finds himself framed by dirty French cops. Li goes on the run, but with help from prostitute Bridget Fonda, to crack the drug ring. The story isn't really all that great, like most Besson pictures ("Leon" being the main exception), but the action is terrific (Li's regulars collaborator Corey Yuen was the martial arts choreographer on this film). Besides Li being an amazing martial artist, which is the main reason to watch this film, Fonda is quite good in what is her second to last theatrical film performance before retiring from acting. This movie made me miss her. Fonda was never Meryl Steep, but she was always very likable and genuine in her films, whether it was a silly action flick like "Point of No Return," a rom-com like "It Could Happen to You," or an indie like "Scandal," she was always good. Besides Fonda, you also have the reliably good Ric Young as the slimy drug lord and Burt "Cato from The Pink Panther" Kwouk in a small role. As with most Besson productions, this is slickly made if empty headed entertainment, but Li (with aid from Corey Yuen) and a good performance by Fonda, manage to elevate this above Besson's usual output.

I'm about to do something I've never done. I'm going to "review" this film after having turned if off about 15 minutes in.You don't have to ignore this review; just read it while keeping in mind the caveat that I turned "Kiss of the Dragon" off, 15 minutes in.It's simple really: 15 minutes in, I had no idea where the flick was headed. Now, the usual retort is to point out that a lot of flicks do that: They defer spelling out the underlying key plot points quite a ways into the flick. So why do I refuse to cut KotD the kind of slack that is due to a slow-burn sizzler storyline?Because KotD doesn't sizzle. In fact, one gets the sense that Besson is fully aware of the need to create tension of one kind or another in order to sustain things while the viewer gathers the data which will eventually pay off in a stunner revelation. But the data stream is... well, I was about to say bizarre... but bizarre is good! In fact, it might be a good idea at this point to mention his La Femme Nikita (the film). It sustains for a good, long while until the data is gathered because the leading action is bizarre *enough*. There's an amazing firehose of bizarrerie that keeps you alert and pondering, until the air clears and all the necessary pieces fall into place; well, at least, enough of the pieces to apprise you of the fact that you're watching an actual story.KotD opens with an unsatisfying, disconnected cubistic salad of cloak/daggerish visual and verbal cues, gangster scenarios, a hookers/john sequence that floats in an utter void, and a weird, utterly inexplicable 180 degree turnabout in the relationship between the crime boss and the new recruit--10 minutes into their relationship--which can't even be explained away as a spurious psychopathic lark on the part of the crime boss, let alone as a natural concomitant of the recruit's actions.I suppose that, if I'd hung with it, I'd've been able to metabolize that salad in some fashion. But, 15 minutes in, my question to myself was, "Why bother?"In the stuff I describe above, I don't mention Jet Li's lovely martial arts moves. And I left them out for a reason; because I wanted to preserve them from the disreputable notion that Besson thought they'd suffice to keep the viewer's attention.I think reviewing the first 15 minutes of this flick was worth doing-- there was so much to say!--so I did it. I hope you understand.

Action scenes galore, and superbly executed by Jet Li, who kills, seriously injures or knocks unconscious some 100 policemen in this picture. Finally he kills Insp. Richard (Tchéky Karyo) with the horrible "Kiss of the Dragon" acupuncture method whereby the paralysed Richard bleeds from every orifice before crashing dead to the floor. However, none of these characters has a clue about acting: only Ms. Bridget Fonda is capable of it and she emotes plenty as the whore with a heart of gold. However, you wonder what on earth she was doing accepting a meaningless role in a plot less and drama-free movie such as this. Shortly afterwards, she drove her car off a cliff and then got married and quit show business. It's not surprising, is it...

This movie makes the interesting decision to tell you nothing about its story for at least the first 20 minutes, which is nothing but a bravura sequence of martial arts action that is highly enjoyable even though you have no idea what's going on. After that opening sequence the movie tells you more-or-less what's going on, but some plot points aren't explained in the slightest, most notably what exactly Bridget Fonda has to do with anything.This is one of those movies where dozens of people die without seeming to trigger any investigations; you can't imagine anything in this movie really going down the way it does. But the action is terrific, the bad guy is entertainingly, ridiculously evil (he does everything except kick a puppy) and over all I liked it.