Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

In Kiss of the Dragon (the exportable, generic title relates arbitrarily to the hero's wizardly expertise with acupuncture pins), Jet Li plays Liu Jiuan, a Chinese government agent who arrives in Paris on an assignment so top secret, it takes a while to figure out how the game is to be played. Liu's contact is Richard (''The Patriot'''s Tchéky Karyo), an explosive French police chief who stinks of sadism: Richard's sharky gray suit looks evil, the geometrical stubble on his jaw looks evil, and he's first seen pulping an already crumpled victim in that most sinister of tough guy settings, a hotel kitchen.

Before long, Richard has turned his psychopathic anger on Liu himself. And, in the course of making sense of the baffling Parisian pickle in which he finds himself, the Chinese visitor in the City of Light meets up with corn fed Jessica (Bridget Fonda), a bruised young American woman stumbling through the ill lit, vice ridden backstreets of Paree, where Richard -- an exceedingly busy bad cop -- has hooked her on heroin, forced her into prostitution, and abducted her little daughter.

''Kiss of the Dragon'' is directed by Chris Nahon, a French commercial filmmaker making his feature debut, and the story is by Li himself. But the movie's sensibilities belong above all to Luc Besson, the compellingly brash, Hollywood besotted French director of ''La Femme Nikita,'' ''The Fifth Element,'' and ''The Professional.'' Besson produced ''Kiss'' and cowrote the script with Robert Mark Kamen, and as with those previous productions, he's high on the romance of the underbelly, the lure of the American style taciturn loner.

Besson's Paris is a city of iconic settings turned sinister -- a Metro station, a tour boat on the Seine, the Eiffel Tower. The inventive adversaries, meanwhile, are icons of a different sort: terrifying white goons with bleached coifs, an impossibly well muscled black superman, furious thugs with huge guns. (The nimble action choreography is by Cory Yuen, who also worked with Li on ''Lethal Weapon 4.'')

This is all grimy, guy on guy fun, right down to the fevered, bad English dialogue. But there's one crucial fight Liu can't win, and neither can Jet Li. ''My life is not some fairy tale! My life is hell!'' Jessica the unwilling streetwalker whines, her eyes black rimmed with misery and eye shadow. She's a sad, strung out American girlie, a female stock character of a familiar, helpless sort, and Fonda doesn't know what to do with her. Too wan to play her as a really desperate single mother, too stiff to play her as a really unstrung skank, the actress makes the faces and gestures of degradation without letting herself get dirty enough. This leaves Li to kick in the air by himself. Fortunately, he's magnetic enough to take on Paris -- and Hollywood -- all by himself.

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