Black Mask
Script/Story: 2
Acting/Casting: 4
Action: 7
Humor: NA
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 5
Overall: 4.5

Let's be honest: this is a terrible film. The "plot" is cobbled together from mostly random events and is full of more holes than a thrift store overcoat. Characters appear one place when they need to, then vanish, then reappear elsewhere. They're enemies one minute, then friends, then strangers. Every major action scene has at least half a dozen completely impossible actions, and even within the framework of the film's world events don't make consistent sense. Sometimes the superhuman bad guys can't be killed by dozens of shots, yet other times they drop dead from a single bullet. Some of those problems are likely due to the poor dubbing on the US version I watched, but even as a silent film this one wouldn't have made any consistent sense.

If you watch it you'll be doing so solely for the martial arts and other action scenes, and while those are good, they're not good enough to carry the rest of the nonsense.  This one is definitely a strong entry for fast forward theater, and really, you'll be perfectly happy if you start fast forwarding over the talking the first time you see it.

I should note that the violence is very Hong Kong cinema style, which means it's got far, far more violence than you're used to seeing in commercial US films. Flesh melts and gets ripped off, heads and limbs are chopped free, blood gushes in torrents, and you see much more of the impact and pain of things. I don't think it would get an X in the US, but it's a very hard R. I consider this a point of pedigree, but if you like your violence without blood or pain, you will be unhappy.  There is much less indiscriminate slaughter of civilians than many Hong Kong movies feature, but that's just because there aren't ever any civilians around. Lesser characters, especially cops and drug lord stooges, are massacred like chickens in a KFC farm, and human life, other than that of a few main characters, has no meaning or value at all.

The action is also wildly inventive and illogical. Bad guys in a flooded sewer have dirt bikes that they don't use, but that Jet can steal and do a trick on.  During an early assault on a drug lord there are zip lines overhead so the bad guys can fly around and drop bombs. Where did the lines come from, in the drug lord's HQ? Also, once chaos breaks out, huge wrecking balls begin crashing through the walls, invariably hitting just behind Jet Li and making him dive to avoid them. Where are the cranes swinging them? Who's driving the cranes? How did massive construction equipment appear in the area? How do they aim them through the walls? In a later scene Jet is in a truck, and suddenly as he stops 4 tire locks fly out of nowhere and stick every wheel of his vehicle, and bad guys surround him. While they advance with their machine guns he's able to pull a pocket propane torch out of a case (he just happened to be carrying one around, you see), cut a hole through the floor, and drop out with the unconscious girl, while simultaneously making the truck shoot forwards about fifty feet (the tire locks just vanish) drawing the bad guys' attention and machine gun fire while Jet carries the girl and vanishs into a sudden cloud of steam.

And so on; that sort of stuff happens in every action scene, and you've just got to accept it like you accept the flying in Crouching Tiger, since it's there, and it's not going away.

Spoilers. Sort of; I'd actually have preferred this plot summary in advance, since it would have saved me having to pay attention to the terrible dialogue scenes.

Anyway, the plot, if you can call it that, starts off with Jet Li as a super powerful bio-engineered soldier in China. He is part of a unit of other genetically modified warriors, the incomprehensibly-titled 701s, and when he somehow learns that they're all slated to be terminated he breaks into the base his fellows are held in, (no telling why he wasn't in there with them) shooting dozens (hundreds?) of Chinese soldiers on the way. The scene ends with him machine gunning and dodging tank fire and such, all in a huge warehouse.

The movie then cuts to to a year later, with Jet's character living in Hong Kong. He doesn't know if the other 701s got out or not, but he hasn't investigated and doesn't really want to know, since he's trying to leave that life behind and is working as a librarian and playing board games with his one friend, a police detective. Fortunately for the viewer, the action follows him, and an unknown band of super assassins begin murdering all the drug lords of Hong Kong in imaginative and gruesome ways, and with the police powerless to stop the killing (why they'd want to, since drug lords are the ones dying, isn't really explained) Jet gets involved once he realizes the killers are his old 701 comrades. He picks a cheesy black mask out of a thrift store bin and starts showing up at the action spots and battling the other super bad guys, while trying to protect the police, especially his one friend, a really roughneck cop.

The powers of Jet and his fellows aren't ever explained, but they apparently are somewhat superhuman and engineered to not feel pain. It doesn't make any sense though, since they can do some super leaping, and can take damage that would kill a real person in a second, but they obviously feel pain while they are basically immortal... unless the plot calls for them to die, in which case they do so almost immediately. It's quite inconsistent, but there are some great battles since the damage they can take and deal is almost infinite... when the plot calls for that, anyway. Probably the best scene early on has Jet beating one of the other guys down several times, and finally throwing him onto a pile of iron rods, several of which are sticking up in typical "someone's going to get impaled on these" movie style. The impact doesn't even slow down the bad guy though, so Jet grabs the two rods and bends them down over the guy's shoulders, pinning him to the ground where he keeps struggling.

There's a sub plot in that, like Replicants in Blade Runner, all of the 701s have limited lives. In this case it's due to "the government" leaving something in them that will kill them in a year if they don't get the antidote or a virus upgrade or something. Of course the film opens up with an action scene when Jet frees his fellows, and then cuts to a year later in Hong Kong, so apparently it's already been a year. So are they due to die at any minute? Or do they have another year to go?

It's also unclear who has the antidote. The dubbed version we watched only referred to the powers that be as "the government." But which one? The 701s were apparently Chinese soldiers, but since the movie is set in in 1998, and the bulk of the action takes place in Hong Kong, why would the Chinese government be involved? They weren't allowed into the British protectorate of Hong Kong until 1999, after all. Why aren't the 701s doing their deeds in China, where the government with the antidote actually is? Hong Kong certainly can't get it from the Chinese mainland government, who regards them as a rogue island. Also, given the superpowers of these soldiers, you'd expect that they would just invade the Chinese government base and steal the antidote. But no, they're killing drug lords in Hong Kong instead, and they wait a year to start doing that, for no reason we ever hear about. There doesn't seem to be any reason for their killing, though the obvious logic is that they're going to take over the drug dealing empire and take the profits all for themselves. Nope.

The overall plot is that the 701s are doing the drug killings to get police attention, so that when the higher ranking government (Interpol? China?) gets involved, they'll send (over the Internet) all their criminal database over to the local cops. Why this will help is never explained, and in fact it clearly wouldn't, since the 701s are a secret government project, and knowing their names wouldn't help the Hong Kong cops capture them anyway. Along with the criminal database "the government" is apparently also sending tons of info about police in Hong Kong and all over the world, info that must not fall into criminal hands. So of course the bad guys are tapping their phone and stealing the info as it comes in (info that they burn onto a single CD-ROM even as they're copying it) from their secret base in the flooded tunnels beneath the police station/hospital.  As I said, it's all complete nonsense.

The 701s plan to sell the stolen police database to various bad guys around the globe, Columbians and others, though why they want it isn't known either. It's not like undercover informants are really paralyzing those cartels or anything. The 701s are also going to use the info to blackmail "the government" into giving them the cure for the bionic plague that's going to kill them in a year. I'd think making a billion dollars from controlling all drug trade in Hong Kong and then using some fraction of it to bribe a scientist would be easier, but as I said, the logic of this movie is completely illogical.

Will they succeed? Will Jet Li stop them and save his cute librarian girl friend and get the cure himself? Take a wild guess.

End plot spoilers.

Curious to see how others took the film, I checked out the Amazon.com reviews. They're mostly positive, but far from glowing. The most informative comments tell that Black Mask, like just about every other foreign film released by a US movie company, has been largely ruined by bad dubbing, the lack of a subtitled track, and the stupid insertion of rap (or whatever) music and removal of the original score. I've not seen it without the US additions, and I'm not likely to hunt it down in original form, but I can imagine it being better with good subtitles. It still wouldn't be less than ridiculous and worth watching only for the fight scenes, but it wouldn't hurt.

The reviewers also list several other higher quality Jet Li films from his Hong Kong days, and I've put a few of those on my list for future purchase/viewing.

As for Black Mask, I'm sounding pretty negative, and I am about the stupid plot, but I didn't hate the film, and I don't regret giving it an hour and a half of my life. It's terrible as a film, but as a fun action movie it's not bad at all. We paid $7 for it used from Blockbuster, and it wasn't a bad purchase for that price. I can imagine watching it again just to FF to the fight scenes, which were inventive and exciting, and I didn't even mind watching the whole thing through the first time. I'll never do it again, but that's true of lots of DVDs, quite a few of which I paid a lot more than $7 for.

Go into Black Mask expecting a ridiculous action movie plot and just enjoy the fights and action sequences, and you'll be happy. I'm giving it a 4.5, but it's a fun 4.5, and I will definitely watch it again at some point, if only for the action scenes.