High Risk Review

It is this kind of movies that make a reviewer frantically search her soul for answers to the Unanswerable Questions, the most persistent of which strikes you in the (symbolic?) darkness of the theater: "What am I doing here?" The answer to which is not easy at all, considering that you are also faced with the task of watching a movie that makes no sense whatsoever.

The entire issue can be dismissed by a casual and irritated shake of your tired head, but if taken seriously, it could also lead to the very questions that make philosophers of us all. If, in such moments of extreme disillusion, a reviewer chooses to dwell on the question of what drives filmmakers into making such monstrosities, humanity might gain some very valuable insights into itself.

But I have a job to do, so let us leave the abstract for later.

A Bad Man and his gang take a hotelful of people hostage during some kind of jewelry exhibition. The people in the hotel include a cartoon of a star, Jackie, whose stardom depends on the stunts which his bodyguard Jet Li obligingly doubles for him, his father, two journalists with a hidden camera, the girlfriend of a CID agent, foreign ambassadors and other seemingly important people.

The Bad Men storm the hotel, kill a whole lot and take the rest hostage, loot the jewels, demand a helicopter and plan their escape. But Jet Li, our hero, has other plans for them and so takes them on (single-handedly, of course).

With bad editing, long unconvincing fight routines, juvenile humor, illogical incidents and irritating acting, the movie is a horror to behold. Jet Li does a few sequences with all sincerity, but it is lost on you. After the first few minutes of High Risk, any sane person would close his eyes and think of more pleasant things, or close his eyes and pray. Either way, he would close his eyes.