The Art of War

Thirty minutes into this Wesley Snipes disaster, I had no idea what was going on. Thirty minutes after that, I felt exactly the same way, leading me once again to wonder how a script this incoherent could find its way into production. Snipes hereby extends his recent perfect record for starring in movies that do justice to neither his skill as an actor nor as an action hero. He can act (witness the under appreciated “The Waterdance”), and he certainly has all the tools a good action hero needs. What he apparently cannot do is find a good script, or recognize a bad one when it smacks him in the box office. In “The Art of War,” he also manages to drag a few other good actors down with him. The story is too ludicrous to merit a lot of attention, but basically it seems that Snipes is a covert operative for the United Nations. Yes, that's right, the United Nations, so I guess all of you who believe that the UN is actually a conspiracy to impose a New World Order are right, although if the lame brained stunts that writer Beach comes up with for Snipes is the best the UN can do, you don’t have a lot to worry about.

Donald Sutherland (who seems--or at least, should be--embarrassed to be in the picture) plays the Secretary-General of the UN, and the usually capable Anne Archer is some sort of sinister factotum in the organization, and both of them are terrible. Michael Biehn is on hand as a white, hip-hopish sidekick to Snipes, and he, too, gets bulldozed by the general incompetence of the proceedings. In fact, Chaykin, playing an overweight FBI agent, is the only one who seems to get away with his dignity more or less intact. Anyway, Snipes has to solve the murder of a Chinese Ambassador, which is somehow tied into a big trade agreement, as well as the murder of a bunch of Chinese immigrants. In the course of his “investigation” he teams up (reluctantly, of course) with a comely Chinese interpreter (Matiko), but I am not sure if they ever kiss at the end, because I walked out of the theater before then.

Of course, none of this really matters, because the movie is just an excuse to put Snipes through a series of action set-pieces. To his credit, Snipes (who is reportedly a martial arts enthusiast in real life) handles these quite convincingly. He (or his stunt double) can run, jump, fight, drive fast, and shoot-shoot-shoot, just like an action hero in a real movie. But what the filmmakers here fail to grasp is that these activities mean nothing in a vacuum. If you cannot make them relevant to characters in whom we can take at least a passing interest, and a story that is at least marginally engaging, we Just Don’t Care. I know I didn’t. And oddly, though I am sure that the picture cost scads of money, it had a cheap feel for the most part. A lot of it is shot in dark, underlit places, which usually means that they are trying to save money by cutting corners. (Not that better lighting would have saved this picture, but it couldn’t have hurt.) The movie opens with an elaborate sequence which I imagine was supposed to show how adept and resourceful Snipes and his team are, but instead shows how weak the script is, since not much of what they do makes any sense at all.

As if the IQ-impaired script weren’t enough, the picture is also saddled with director Duguay, and there should be a special place reserved in hell for directors of his ilk. Not only does he suffer from a severe case of 10-second-attention-span syndrome (common among directors weaned on MTV), but he also seems to have a movement disorder of some sort. He can’t keep the damn camera still to save his life; it is constantly swooping, spinning, twirling, and shaking, in a fashion that not only adds nothing to the impact of the scenes, but induces vertigo in the viewer. It literally makes watching much of this picture a physically unpleasant experience. Duguay has obviously mistaken camera instability for directorial flourish, and there probably should be a restraining order placed on him prohibiting him from approaching within 500 feet of a movie camera. Maybe that would remind him that if you make the people in the audience sick, they probably won’t enjoy your movie. (8/27/2000)