ant action?  Well you'd better, since that's what you're going to get.  There is a little bit of story and some human elements, enough to make you care who wins or looses, but it's far from character driven, and you're not exactly going to be sitting up all night pondering the insights revealed through the clever dialogue.  Jet Li beats up a ton of bad guys in relatively inventive ways, mostly bare handed. The end.

This isn't any sort of spoiler; all of this occurs in the first 10 minutes of the film.  The rest of the movie is about what you expect.  Jet Li battles endless evil French cops and even some evil pimps for good measure, helps the poor "in too deep" hooker (Bridget Fonda) rescue her daughter, and looks cool doing it.

The plot is very minor, just a way to set up endless fight scenes, most of which are very well done, if usually somewhat silly.  I'll buy that Jet Li can beat up all these other people, though how many of them are available is often absurd.  But the fact that he must have 500 bullets fired at him, usually from close range, and only gets hit once (and then it doesn't even seem to bother him) was a bit silly.

Most of the fight scenes are very good.  Jet Li is sort of a more deadly Jackie Chan, since he uses props and tables and such, and it's always this little lone Chinese guy against hordes of much larger (mostly) white people, but when Jet hits people they tend to stay down, instead of just getting back up time after time like in the more comical Jackie Chan movies.

I enjoyed it, and I'll watch some of the fight scenes again, but on the whole it's a pretty dumb movie. It's really just a Kung Fu porno, where the plot is entirely incidental and exists solely as a set up to the action scenes.

Now for some dumb stuff.  Stop here if you don't want any sort of action spoilers.

While most of the action is relatively realistic, the plot has numerous absurdities.  The first is in the opening sequence, when Jet Li arrives in Paris posing as a tourist.  He smuggles a pistol in with him, but it's soon revealed that he's a Chinese cop, and is meeting French police.  So why the hell did he have to smuggle a gun?  Why not just get one from the French cops, or the Chinese embassy?  The reason, as we soon find out, is so the evil French cop could use his gun to shoot someone, trying to frame Jet Li for it before killing him.  From there on Jet Li has at least twenty chances to pick up a gun from his defeated enemies, anything from a pistol to a grenade launcher, but never does so, always fighting bare-handed, which is his style. Which is cool and all, but it's so obvious that the only reason he had a gun in the first place was to have it taken away and used to frame him that you find yourself scoffing at the obvious plot device.

Another ongoing thing that strains believability is Jet Li's acupuncture.  He's got a bracelet with hundreds of acupuncture pins in it, which is a nice idea.  The silly part is that he's able to stick them into a person and cause instant sleep, healing, paralysis, and even death. From one pin, a centimeter under your skin.  It's absurd, but you just have to accept it.  Think of it like Spock's old Vulcan neck pinch.  Obviously physically impossible, but just take it as a construct of the world it's used in.  I was going along with the super acupuncture until the very end, where he kills a bad guy in spectacularly gory fashion with one poke in the neck, and then I just laughed.

The other odd thing was that they were actually in Paris for it, but aside from one opening scene where he's taking a cab from the airport and they pass by every famous landmark in Parie, the movie could have been filmed entirely on a soundstage in Hollywood.  And probably was, for all I know. At least 98% of it takes place inside various sets that exist primarily to be destroyed in a huge fight, and could be in any city on earth.

There is one other scene on a boat touring along a river, and it's a nice view of Paris, though we see about 30 seconds of that, and then 10 minutes of a fight inside the boat, which is an obvious set. That scene was the first time the assembly line of bad guys seemed silly, since Jet Li is on a boat with a guy from the Chinese Embassy, and suddenly there are about 5 bad guys.  How did they get on the boat?  Of course once he deals with those there are another 10 guys, and then about 15 more on top of the boat, in black ski masks, for no apparent reason.  Who are they hiding their identity from? (The viewer, so they can reuse stunt men.) After the fight Jet gets up under a bridge, and yep, there's a bad guy under the bridge too, shooting madly at him while he leaps from girder to girder.  They had time to get ahead of the boat and put a guy underneath a bridge, just in case?

They do have some fun with the ridiculous amounts of bad guys though; when eventually Jet is in a police station he's running from one group of armed cops and ducks into a room with a convenient metal door and huge sliding bar lock.  He then turns around and the room is like a karate studio, and there are about thirty guys with night sticks in their karate kid outfits. Yes, ninja cops.  It's good for a laugh though, as Jet Li looks around at his "out of the frying pan, into the fire" enemies.

He must defeat and/or kill upwards of 100 people in the movie, all but about 8 of them corrupt French cops, and he kills or severely injures probably 50 people with his bare hands.  Yet once the main bad guy is dead he's apparently able to just walk out of a police station that the army is surrounding, to freedom, with no problems, despite the fact that he just murdered the chief of police and most of his top officers.

In other words, check your logic at the door.

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