7 / 10
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, which is more than most action films of 2000 could say.
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 isn’t a film about realism. It’s a film about Jet Li moving in ways nobody else can, and the first five minutes promise that you’ll get plenty of it.
Han flies to California and starts asking questions. Nobody wants to answer them, and several people want to kill him for asking.
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.
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.
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 genuine 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.
Romeo Must Die was the studio’s attempt to make him a leading man for a new audience, and he’s terrific in it. Calm, watchful, quietly funny, and so fast the camera sometimes has trouble keeping up.
He doesn’t try to be charming in the Hollywood way. 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. 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’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.
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, and that gives the whole film 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.
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. The chemistry is obvious, and the film won’t let it land.
The Football Field
The best fight in the film takes place on a football field. Han is cornered by a group of security guards who are playing a pickup game, and he takes them on using the ball, the players and the game itself.
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.
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.
When you write action, 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.
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.
It’s ridiculous and it’s brilliant. It solves a genuine 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.
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.
When you write a character with a firm principle, the temptation is to let them break it when the plot gets difficult.
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.
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 lands, a jolt of brutality in an otherwise playful film.
The wire-work is the weak point. 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. His real ability is extraordinary without any help, and every time a wire pulls him, you lose a little of it.
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.
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.
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.
What Keeps It At 7
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 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.
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.
Watch it for Jet Li’s first American lead and for Aaliyah’s first and best film role. Watch it for the football field. 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
Romeo Must Die makes a thin plot tolerable by putting its best set piece where nobody expects one. A football game isn’t a place for a fight, and that’s precisely why the fight is memorable.
When you write a familiar story, the reader already knows the beats, so the surprise has to come from where and how things happen, not from what happens.
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.
Is Romeo Must Die worth watching?
Yes. It’s a 7 on paper and a film I’ve had a great time with three times. Watch it for Jet Li, for Aaliyah and for the football field, and don’t worry about the plot.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists