Action thriller Romeo Must Die saw Jet Li co-star with Aaliyah in one of her last roles. As we re-evaluate the cinema of 2000, does it stand the test of time?
This is the latest in AJ Black’s series of features on films released in the year 2000. He previously looked back at Steven Soderbergh’s drama, Erin Brockovich. Potential spoilers lie ahead…
Just to underscore the box office power Erin Brockovich had on release, Romeo Must Die actually debuted in second place at the box office, despite being the highest grossing new release of that week.
On paper, Andrzej Bartkowiak’s action picture might have appeared enough to see off Erin’s David versus Goliath drama, even with the star wattage of Julia Roberts behind it. Romeo Must Die front-lines two major stars of the moment, contains a plot filled with Hong Kong-style action, not to mention a surfeit of guns and a couple of car chases thrown in. It should have appealed to a broader audience, but while by no means a flop – almost quadrupling its fairly minuscule budget – Romeo Must Die is barely remembered two decades on save for one tragic factor: Aaliyah.
One of the biggest stars in hip-hop and R&B of the late 90s and early 2000s, Aaliyah was a child prodigy who became an era-defining star. Aaliyah would have no doubt had a long career, but fate took a cruel turn in August 2001 when she, along with much of her retinue, died when her private jet crashed shortly after takeoff. She was just 21 years old.
Romeo Must Die wasn’t the final film she starred in during her budding cinematic career (that honour goes to the poorly-made sequel to Interview With The Vampire, Queen Of The Damned), but it was the most successful.
The fact Romeo Must Die only stands out because of the sad, untimely death of its co-star is a telling indictment of a leaden misfire which hasn’t aged too well at all.
As you might have gleaned from the title, Romeo Must Die (very) loosely bases its plot around the Capulet and Montague families from William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet. It’s part of a late-90s trend in American cinema to update the Bard in modern sub-genres.
Baz Luhrmann’s mid-90s gangster update of the play in Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the star-crossed lovers, made it fashionable to rework Shakespeare in modern contexts. Similarly, 10 Things I Hate About You memorably twisted The Taming Of The Shrew into a perky high-school comedy in 1999, while Ethan Hawke played an updated Hamlet in the corporate sphere later in the year.
Romeo Must Die was another example of a production using Shakespeare to boost the intellectual cred of what is otherwise another lowbrow action thriller. Romeo Must Die constantly feels like a B-movie fighting clashing with its makers’ attempts to be cool and sexy. It would have no doubt been more successful had it lightened up and accepted how silly it is.
Jet Li, after all, is playing a super-human character in Han Sing, aka, Akbar (a not at all racist joke about him claiming to pass as a Muslim cab driver). He busts out of prison to avenge his brother’s murder, only to end up caught in a Californian turf war between a pair of Chinese and African-American gangster families vying for power and control. Li was hot property by this point, having stood out as the only reason to bother watching Lethal Weapon 4, where producer Joel Silver ported him in because he felt that Li could present a truly scary, ‘alien’ threat to the ageing, American as apple pie Detectives Riggs and Murtaugh.
Silver had begun to feel that American action cinema was lacking freshness and looked to the vibrant Hong Kong action cinema scene – which had already translated over the wildly entertaining Hard Boiled and influenced Jackie Chan’s breakout hit in Hollywood with action comedy Rush Hour – as a way to inject some new impetus into the genre, as Sabrina Q Yu recounts in the book, Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom:
Given the fact that almost all the film talents that Hollywood has imported from Hong Kong are working in the martial arts/action arena, it’s not difficult to work out the intentions of Hollywood filmmakers are to use Hong Kong action to make a profit. In an interview, Joel Silver says that, because he was annoyed by seeing nothing fresh or original in American action films, he decided to make Romeo Must Die. But Silver’s search for the ‘fresh and original’ is obviously confined to the domain of action scenes only. He proudly mentions one new element tried out in the film – a scene in which Li’s martial arts fighting is presented in X-ray — commenting: “when we played that scene in America, audiences went out of their fuckin’ minds”. Elsewhere, Silver neatly sums up the way in which Li is used in the film: “Jet Li is our special effect”.
When you watch Romeo Must Die, a great deal of this makes sense. The script barely characterises Li, in his full English-language debut, and focuses squarely on stunts which at times simply beggar belief.
At the time, no doubt buoyed by the science fiction bullet time and kung-fu which had wowed audiences in 1999’s The Matrix, the appetite for this fusion of special effects with martial arts stunt work was obviously there, but the x-ray effect simply looks naff today, like something ported out of an average 90s fighting game. It certainly didn’t breed a legion of similar films employing the same technique.
If anything, audiences responded far more to the genuine, hard-edged action realism Hong Kong cinema would later use to influence such films as The Raid or Headshot – starring actors influenced by Li such as Iko Uwais – and these are techniques which would even bake into western action franchises such as Jason Bourne, Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and the Daniel Craig-era James Bond series. Romeo Must Die now looks spectacularly old hat and at times plain ridiculous when lined up against those films, awkwardly attempting to infuse the hyper-reality of Hong Kong action with the grit of an American crime drama, and the two never really come together.
In fact, it’s remarkable just how little action there even is in Bartkowiak’s film, with moments of Li fighting punctuated by acres of scenes which attempt to progress the needlessly complicated plot. It leaves Aaliyah to try to do the emotional heavy lifting as Trish, the daughter of Delroy Lindo’s conflicted crime baron, who ends up helping Li’s Han to expose the truth behind his brother’s death. She’s the Juliet, ostensibly, to Li’s Romeo, but strangely, there’s never really any romance between the two, which defies the point of the Shakespearean allusions in the story.
The script is more interested in Trish’s difficult relationship with her father, and Aaliyah – while an engaging screen presence who could well have developed into a strong actress – just doesn’t have the experience (or the dialogue) to be anything other than one-note. She and Li have zero chemistry, and it makes for an awkward pairing, especially in a terribly put-together fight sequence that never would be made today: Li using Aaliyah as a weapon against a female Chinese fighter because “I cannot fight a girl!”. Yeah.
Romeo Must Die is therefore an entirely forgettable and frequently quite dull experience which never lives up to the promise of marrying the dramatic depth of a Shakespeare play with the verve of Hong Kong action cinema.
It’s worth your time alone for a glimpse at the star Aaliyah could have become had she not passed on before her time, even if the film itself is no fitting epitaph.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here.
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