7 / 10
Official trailer
Three Times and Counting
I’ve watched Romeo Must Die three times, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of every viewing. It’s not a good film in the way The Foreigner is a good film. The plot is a tangle of double-crosses nobody could summarize afterward, the dialogue is functional, and the wire-work was already looking dated when it came out. None of that matters.
What it has is rhythm. A fight, a joke, a song, two people talking in a car, another fight. It’s built like a good album, and it knows exactly what it’s for. On the right night, that’s all I want from a film. And it has Jet Li and Aaliyah. Most action films of 2000 couldn’t say that much, and none of them had a pairing with this kind of easy warmth.
A Prison Break Upside Down
The film opens in a Hong Kong prison. Han Sing, a former cop, is serving time for crimes his family’s organization committed. When word comes that his younger brother has been killed in Oakland, he escapes, and he does it while hanging upside down in chains, fighting guards with his feet.
It’s absurd and it tells you everything. This is a film about Jet Li moving in ways nobody else can, and the first five minutes promise that you’ll get plenty of it. The escape is so outlandish that it works as a contract with the audience: nothing that follows will be realistic, and all of it will be fun.
I’d happily watch a whole film of Li fighting upside down in chains. The escape is silly in the best way, and I’d take that over another grim prison opening any day.
Han flies to California and starts asking questions, a stranger in a city where both sides of a turf war already know his name and his family’s reputation. Nobody wants to answer them, and several people want to kill him for asking. The first act is a series of doors slammed in his face, each one a little more violently than the last.
Two Families and a Football Stadium
Han’s father runs a Chinese crime family in Oakland.
Isaak O’Day, played by Delroy Lindo, runs a Black crime family on the other side of the waterfront. Both are quietly buying up land from local businesses, because a developer wants it for a new football stadium and will pay a fortune. The murders begin: Han’s brother first, then Isaak’s son. Each side blames the other, and the war that follows is exactly what someone on the inside wanted.
The real villains are the men below the bosses, each selling out his own side to cash in on the land deal. It’s a familiar shape, and the stadium scheme gives the film a real-world greed underneath all the kicking. Land, money and a public project are the kind of prize real gangsters fight over, and the film is sharper for choosing one.
Isaiah Washington plays Isaak’s right-hand man Mac, and Russell Wong plays Kai, who works for Han’s father. Both are better than the script deserves, and Washington in particular makes his betrayal feel personal. Mac is a loyal man who has decided loyalty doesn’t pay, and you can watch him make the choice.
For Writers
Romeo Must Die hangs a thin crime plot on a real-world motive: a stadium deal and the land underneath it. Greed gives the murders a reason the audience instantly understands.
When you write a crime story, vague criminal ambition leaves readers unsure what anyone is fighting over, and the stakes blur.
Give your villains a concrete prize the reader could picture, a building, a contract, a piece of land, and make every betrayal in the story move somebody closer to it.
Jet Li Arrives
In Hong Kong, Jet Li was a real star. Once Upon a Time in China made him the heir to the great kung fu heroes, and Fist of Legend is one of the finest martial arts films ever made. His American debut had been as the silent villain in Lethal Weapon 4, where he took over the film in four fight scenes.
The studio’s attempt to make him a leading man for a new audience was Romeo Must Die, and he’s terrific in it. Calm, watchful, dryly funny, and so fast the camera sometimes has trouble keeping up. He moves like someone for whom the fight is the easy part and the talking is the effort.
He skips the Hollywood charm. He’s reserved and a little formal, and the film gets a lot of gentle comedy out of him standing still while everyone around him shouts. It worked, and it worked on audiences who had never heard of him. He went on to Kiss of the Dragon, Hero and a long run of American and Chinese films, and this is where the Western part of that career really began.
Aaliyah
Aaliyah plays Trish O’Day, Isaak’s daughter, who runs a clothing boutique and wants nothing to do with her father’s business.
It was her first film role, and she has a screen presence that’s hard to describe. You just watch her. She never seems to be performing, and in a film where almost everyone else is shouting, that stillness is magnetic.
She’s relaxed, funny and completely at ease on camera. Her scenes with Li, driving around Oakland, arguing, teasing him about his clothes, are the best non-fight scenes in the film, and they work because the two of them clearly enjoyed each other. You can see the takes where one of them is trying not to laugh.
She was twenty. She died in a plane crash in August 2001, and she made only one more film, Queen of the Damned. Watching Romeo Must Die now, it’s hard not to see what she might have become. The whole film carries a sadness it never set out to have.
The Kiss That Isn’t There
For a film sold as Romeo and Juliet, it’s strange that the lovers never kiss.
The whole marketing campaign promised a romance across a gang war, and the film delivers a friendship with a handshake. A kiss was filmed. It was reportedly cut after test audiences reacted badly to an interracial romance between an Asian man and a Black woman. What’s left is a love story with the love taken out: a hug at the end, a lot of meaningful looks, and nothing more.
It’s a revealing decision about what a studio thought its audience would accept in 2000, and it hasn’t aged well.
Audiences today notice the missing kiss immediately, and it pulls them out of the story at the exact moment the film wants them most involved. The chemistry is obvious, and the film won’t use it. It’s the single decision that dates the film most, more than the wires or the soundtrack.
This is the choice that makes me angriest about the film. Cutting the kiss because a test audience flinched was cowardice, and the studio made the whole movie smaller to protect itself from a reaction it should have ignored.
Li and Aaliyah make the friendship work anyway.
They tease each other, argue, rescue each other and share a car full of bad jokes, and by the end you believe they’d walk through fire for each other. The film is warmer than its studio wanted it to be. The warmth comes almost entirely from the two of them.
The Football Field
The best fight in the film takes place on a football field. A group of security guards who are playing a pickup game corner Han, and he takes them on using the ball, the players and the game itself. He never throws a punch he doesn’t need, and he’s clearly enjoying himself.
It’s inventive, funny and perfectly timed, and it’s the scene everyone remembers. It works because the setting gives Li new things to do. A fight in a warehouse is a fight in a warehouse. A fight in the middle of a game becomes a game. It also sets up the running joke of the film: Han is always the quiet stranger who wanders into someone else’s world and rearranges it, with the locals left staring at the wreckage.
It’s also the purest Jet Li scene in the film. There are no wires to speak of and no X-ray inserts, just a very fast man using his body and his surroundings with total control. If the whole film had trusted him the way this scene does, it would have been a lot better.
For Writers
The football fight is memorable because the setting changes what the hero can do. The ball, the players and the rules of the game all become part of the choreography.
In action writing, the same fight in the same kind of room quickly becomes interchangeable, and readers skim it. For every action scene, list three things in the location your character could use or be hurt by, and build the sequence around at least one of them. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on settings that do real work.
Fighting With Trish
The other memorable fight comes when a female assassin attacks, and Han won’t hit a woman. So he picks up Trish and swings her like a weapon, using her legs to kick the assassin while he does the moving. The choreography is detailed and completely clear, and you can follow every blow.
It’s ridiculous and it’s brilliant. It solves a character problem with choreography, and it’s the moment the film’s romance and its action finally become the same thing. Aaliyah is clearly having a wonderful time, and so are we. It’s the scene people describe when they tell a friend about this film.
For Writers
Han won’t hit a woman, so the film solves the problem by turning Trish into the weapon. A character rule creates the fight’s most inventive moment.
Keep the rule, and force the scene to find a way around it. The workaround is usually more interesting than the easy solution you were about to write.
Once a character has a firm principle, the temptation is to let them break it when the plot gets difficult.
The X-Ray Shots and the Wires
Corey Yuen choreographed the fights, and the film’s signature is the X-ray shot: at the moment of impact, the camera cuts inside the body to show bones cracking. It was new in 2000, and it still works, a jolt of brutality in an otherwise playful film. The effect was copied endlessly afterward and rarely used as sparingly.
The wire-work is the weak point, and it’s a self-inflicted wound. Li is lifted and spun in ways that look obviously supported, and it undercuts his real speed and skill. He reportedly wasn’t happy with how much of it there was, and I’m with him. He’s fast enough and precise enough without any help, and every time a wire pulls him, you lose a little of what makes him special.
Joel Silver’s Machine
Joel Silver produced it, and it’s very much his formula: martial arts crossed with hip-hop, a heavy soundtrack, an action scene every ten minutes and a plot that exists to connect them. Silver had perfected the formula with Lethal Weapon and The Matrix, and here he applied it to a new audience.
The soundtrack did better than the film. Aaliyah’s Try Again went to number one, Timbaland produced a lot of the music, and DMX turned up in a small role and on the album. For many people who bought the soundtrack, it was their first sight of Jet Li.
Silver repeated the formula with Exit Wounds and Cradle 2 the Grave, the second with Jet Li and DMX together. Romeo Must Die is the best of the three, because it’s the only one with Aaliyah in it. The other two have the fights and the music and none of the heart.
The Plot, the Wires and the Last Fight
The plot. Nobody watches this for the stadium deal, and when the film stops to explain it, the energy drops. The wires. Too many of them, too obvious, and they turn some of the fights into acrobatics when Li’s real skill would have been more thrilling on its own.
And the ending, a final fight against Kai that’s shot so much like a video game it loses its weight. None of that keeps me from watching it. It keeps it from being better than a 7. The ingredients for an 8 are all here, and the film doesn’t trust them.
Where It Sits
It’s the best of the turn-of-the-century hip-hop martial arts films, and a snapshot of a very specific moment: when Hong Kong action met American music and studios were still working out how to sell it. Within a few years, Hong Kong stars would become regular faces in American action films, and this is one of the films that opened that door.
Watch it for Jet Li’s first American lead and for Aaliyah’s first and best film role, two performers at the start of careers that went in very different directions. The football field alone justifies the ticket. And watch it knowing that it’s exactly as dumb as it looks, and a great deal more fun than it has any right to be.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A thin plot turns tolerable in Romeo Must Die because it puts its best set piece where nobody expects one. A football game isn’t a place for a fight, and that’s exactly why the fight is memorable.
With a familiar story, the reader already knows the beats, so the surprise has to come from where and how things happen. Take your most predictable scene and move it to the least likely setting you can justify. Then write it again and see what the new ground gives you.
The Verdict on Romeo Must Die
Yes. It’s a 7, and I’ve had a great time with it all three times. What holds it at a 7 is the wires, a plot nobody cares about and a missing kiss the studio should have been ashamed to cut. What keeps it from sliding lower is Jet Li, Aaliyah and that football field, and they’re worth every dumb minute around them.
