Movie Reviews

The Art of War

19 Oct 2000

Political thrillers rarely live up to their potential. Take The Art of War. There's an intelligent film in here somewhere, but it is hidden in the whammo slugfest that surrounds it. Here, once again, is a film where the action never stops and the credibility never begins.

The Nobel Peace Prize this year went towards Korean reconciliation efforts. Here we discover that it should not have gone to a political leader, but to U.N. special officer Neil Shaw (Wesley Snipes), a secret agent as smoothly effective as James Bond, but with the street cred of Axel Foley. According to this film, Shaw was hired by Eleanor (Anne Archer), an aide to the Secretary-General (Donald Sutherland, looking suspiciously unlike Kofi Annan), to blackmail Korean politicians into peace talks. Considering the noisy way that Shaw carries out his mission, I'm surprised I didn't hear about this.

A few months later, he witnesses the U.N. Ambassador to China being assassinated just as China prepares to join the G-7. Of course, the villains have a whole diabolical plan worked out. This is evil-doing by numbers, in which the hero finds himself knee-deep in intrigue, and alleged good guys surprise us when revealed as bad guys.

Except they don't. All the faux good guys are so obviously crooked that you wonder how someone as clever as Shaw could ever have trusted them. Perhaps he has been so busy honing his body and mind to perfection that he didn't have time to watch all the other action films and their almost identical bad guys.

Shaw's ally is Chinese-born Julia Fang (Maria Matiko), a feisty U.N. employee. His trust in her is peculiar, because his most effective method of spotting suspicious types is to look for Oriental-looking people. Whatever the case, Julia ends up having the best scenes, suffering in Hitchcock-style suspense while Shaw is out clobbering people.

Wayne Beach and Simon Davis Barry's script has some nice ideas, but they are smothered under Christian Duguay's gung-ho direction. Perhaps it's just as well; if the story wasn't so convoluted, we might figure out exactly how ridiculous it was.