Review of Cradle 2 the Grave (2003) by Vincent T — 10 Jan 2008

It just dawned on me that in every Jet Li movie, maybe not in Lethal Weapon 4, there's just gotta be a sex scene. A really, really, explicit and boundary pushing sex scene. That bothers me, because just like in Romeo Must Die, Kiss of the Dragon, and The One, it wasn't needed, it was actually very frivolous and didn't contribute anything to the plot or suspense or anything.

It was just there for it's own sake. It also bothered me that of course it had to be a BLACK WOMAN taking her clothes off as a cheap whore.. Gabrielle, have you no DIGNITY??....Arrrrggghhhh. Anyway, aside from that somewhat HUGE flaw, this movie was good.

Actually, it would have been a really sucky movie if not for these three people: Jet Li, Anthony Anderson, and Tom Arnold. I mean, especially Anthony & Tom. They were hilarious. As a matter of fact, during the credits, there was an improv scene between the two and it worked! Jet Li, proves once again he can kick butt while looking absolutely bored out of his mind.

The man is incredible when it comes to martial arts, and what is so good about him is that he speaks English with virtually no accent yet can switch right into Mandarin without blinking. DMX is just DMX.

I mean, he's good in the first couple of minutes of the film, but it just kind of drops off. I just can't see him as a kind of a street-wise "honorable" thief. And as for Gabrielle, FOR SHAME!!! The only black woman in the film, and she's a whore? So what if she fights Kelly Hu at the end in her own fight scene? She's taken off her clothes so what's the difference? I also think that Jet Li is trying to find new and exotic ways of killing off the bad guys.

In Kiss, Li sticks a pin in the bad guys neck supposedly cutting off circulation and causing the guy to undergo endometriosis. Then in Romeo, an extremely graphic (with X-ray special effects included) of Li precisely crushing the bad guys neck causing a huge gash in the corotid artery insuring instant death.

However, in Grave, Li goes a step further. He forces a radioactive element down the bad guys throat causing the bad guy to undergo severe radiation sickness. There seems to be another recurring pattern in his films: Fire and Rain.

In the last and final battle scene, there's a "ring of fire" with an incredibly localized low pressure system directly overhead which doesn't seem to extend more than 100 yards in either direction.

Same thing in Romeo Must Die with the pigeons and the fire with the rain? Overall, I liked the movie. It doesn't really matter what the plot was. Jet Li can FIGHT.