'Black Mask': A Highly Wired Act By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, May 15, 1999

Jet Li stars in "Black Mask." (Artisan) Director: Daniel Lee Cast: Jet Li; Ching Wan Lau; Henry Fong; Michael Ian Lambert; Moses Chan Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes Much extreme violence and intense stunts that look like they caused a hernia or two

Where else can you see a guy in a leather lid and a black cardboard mask kung fu fight a fishnet-stockinged, purple-wigged beauty on a crane 200 feet over Hong Kong while a sniper dressed as Dracula takes potshots at them?

Actual grown-ups and those who prefer their movies with dialogue that matches up with the frenetic action of the characters' lips are hereby officially urged to find more tender mercies in other theaters. The rest of us, with our happily retarded brains and our insistence that movies go BOOM! and UGH! and UFF! and blow things up real good – this one's for you, brothers.

The movie stars Jet Li, a world star largely unknown on these shores until a flashy turn in the otherwise grotesquely dim "Lethal Weapon IV." His appearance is largely unremarkable: a handsome man with a mild demeanor, an open face and a friendly smile. He doesn't have Bruce Lee's charisma or Jackie Chan's disarming cuteness. What he has is pure speed. (He was the Chinese martial arts champion for five years in the '70s, even performing for President Nixon at the White House.) A spinning, twisting midair performer, his hands move like lightning and he can do things in midair that violate all the laws from gravity to physics to geometry combined.

Still, the actual star of "Black Mask" may really be Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, whose specialty, first seen widely in America and to great advantage in "The Matrix," is "wiring." It's like the old "Peter Pan" with crotch kicks. That is, wiring the fighters in an elaborate harness supported by a nest of steel twine usually invisible to the camera, under the support of which they can spin, twist, flip, climb, skitter, dance and kick all a good 10 feet off the ground. There's a great deal of that in the over-the-top, beyond belief violence of "Black Mask."

Story? Do I have to? Well, all right, since this is, after all, a movie review: Li plays an escapee from Squad 701, a biochemically enhanced commando unit established in the near future ("Universal Soldier," with Jean-Claude Van Damme, had a similar premise) that the government closed down. But it turns out that all the 701s survived, particularly their caped, sunglasses-wearing, Dracula-looking "Commander." The squad has decided to take over the world by killing all of Hong Kong's drug lords, then computer-siphoning off a secret database of criminal information that will be exchanged for the antidote to their failing health before . . .

Look, this is ridiculous. It makes no difference. Here's the plot: Handsome guy fights hundreds of punk-looking gangsters and commandos, mostly in drippy industrial basements, utilizing kung fu moves unseen on earth and all the cool automatic weapons ever conceived. End of plot. End of review.