War

Jason Statham plays a maverick FBI agent (is there any other kind in movies?) on the trail of an elusive assassin (Jet Li) who killed his partner; meanwhile, the assassin incites a shooting war between rival Japanese and Chinese gangs in San Francisco. The story is threadbare, but writers Lee Anthony Smith and Gregory J. Bradley take the trouble to toss in a whopping plot twist that goes beyond outlandish—and requires more explanatory dialogue than it’s worth (or Statham and Li can handle). Director Philip G. Atwell uses his music-video experience to over-edit the gun-and-martial-arts fights, cramming as much grisly action into every second as 24 frames will carry, but he doesn’t bother to have his actors pronounce “Yakuza” correctly. Fans of this overworked genre will probably get their money’s worth.