On A List of Movie Reviews
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The Art of War (2000)
Rate:
2
Viewed:
2/21
2/21:
By far the worst picture of Wesley Snipes' career hitherto, The Art of War is a relentlessly boring,
incomprehensible espionage actioner.
I couldn't watch it for more than twenty minutes and had to take a mental break each time. The longer the movie went on,
the more it turned out to be a near rip-off of Mission: Impossible but with a
Chinese slant. By the way, I don't understand why the U.N. building has a glass plate that features a gun logo in the middle.
High in charisma but low in robotic behavior, Wesley Snipes was involved in plenty of highly
entertaining films during the 90's such as New Jack City,
Passenger 57, and Murder at 1600, but it's been the
opposite for him here, marking the end of his A-list status. He would eventually serve time in prison for tax evasion and
star in many direct-to-video pictures.
Apart from the incoherent screenplay and the hard-to-see visuals which must have been shot in front of the green screen most of the
time, it's the cast of big-name thespians that bothers me. Jack Ryan would've facepalmed himself if he saw his wife acting
this way. A superlative actor, Donald Sutherland continues to find himself in bad films. Ditto for Michael Biehn who's
average. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, like Wesley Snipes, has done better work in Rising Sun.
Most of the action shown is banal, and, at one point, shamelessly steals a special effect from
The Matrix. Wesley
Snipes pulls off martial arts moves perfectly, but none of them wows me. Sometimes, he jumps off buildings from
one or two stories high and lands on cars or the ground without a hitch before taking off to get his man. In reality, most people
will have broken their legs.
At least, there are a couple of coincidences in regard to Wesley Snipes and Michael Biehn. Both were found reading Sun Tzu's
book The Art of War in separate films: Passenger 57 and K2, respectively.
And they share the same birthday: July 31. Incidentally, Michael Biehn is older than Wesley Snipes by six years.
All in all, Wesley Snipes shouldn't have trashed his career by getting involved with rubbish like The Art of War.