A truly wonderful thing is happening as a result of the recent wave of wuxia influence on Hollywood films, and the transposition of Hong Kong cinema's greatest martial artists into Hollywood: we are seeing a revival of the acting techniques of silent cinema.

The sheer physicality of actors such as Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, and now Jet Li, have turned even their less-than-watchable films into something approaching art. Chan in particular has long been compared with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, with his self-executed stunts that seem to defy most of the laws of physics. Chan's talent, however, is as the straight man/choreographer in comic films such as the "Shanghai" films with Owen Wilson. Chan may want to branch out at this point, but time is limiting his opportunities. So the mantle of kung-fu actor extraordinaire seems to have been passed to Jet Li. Li is best known for playing villians up to this point, but if Jackie Chan is Buster Keaton, then in Louis Leterrier 's preposterous, yet highly watchable newLuc Besson-penned film UNLEASHED, the silent star Li is channeling is not Chaplin, or Keaton, or even Harry Langdon, but Lillian Gish.

What makes Li fascinating is that he is a small, wiry, sweet-faced man with a pockmarked complexion that hints at a particularly fierce battle with adolescent acne, but one who can turn on a dime to reveal a ferocity in face and body that has made him the anointed Next Big Action Hero. In last year's HERO, we began to see the actor behind the martial arts star, in Li's portrayal of the stolid assassin with a hidden agenda. Now, in UNLEASHED, director Leterrier recognizes Li's ability to tell a story with his face, and wisely gives him very little dialogue. But Li shows himself to be a wonderfully intuitive physical actor. It falls on him to transforn this preposterous story into something believable, and he actually pulls it off.

The premise is promising enough: Li is Danny, a man raised by loan shark "Uncle Bart" (Bob Hoskins) from early childhood as a killing machine, much the way pit bulls are trained for illegal dogfighting. Kept in an underground cage, with few comforts other than a beat-up teddybear and a child's alphabet book, Danny lives encased in a metal collar that is only pulled off when his release is accompanied by the words "kill him". Of course, since Danny is Jet Li, this means "cue the kick-ass kung-fu fighting", and kick-ass it is. We've become accustomed to seeing kung-fu in movies during the past few years, but usually camera gimmicks such as slow- and stop-motion, or wires, or the kind of amazing aerial stunts that we've seen in Zhang Yimou's kung-fu mood films, make this particular style look like it's driven as much by the special effects as by the fighters' expertise. Yet the fight scenes in UNLEASHED, shot in a gritty blue, use few of these tricks, trusting its star's adeptness, the obviously trained heavies as his foils, and some horrific sound effects, to carry the action. And in that trust, they succeed splendidly, at times letting the artistry of kung-fu to shine through the carnage. In one scene, Li refuses to fight or even block punches and weapons, instead relying on avoidance moves. I'm told by my own resident kung-fu student that this is a function of the dragon and snake forms of the Shaolin method, and they are fascinating to watch.

UNLEASHED has the crisp crust of an action film, complete with a scenery-chewing villain in Bob Hoskins, who adds just the right touch of humor to his horrifically nasty character. But inside this particular piece of hard celluloid candy is a soft, sweet, gooey center, which kicks in with the entrance of Morgan Freeman, who is still not permitted to give any indication that he has ever possessed genitalia, as a kindly blind piano tuner named Sam who takes Danny in after his escape. Sam's teenaged stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Conlan) seems to treat the newcomer as one would a stray puppy one had adopted from the streets, which is apt in the film's context. If you have ever adopted a pet that has been a stray, or abused, you will recognize the terror with which Li imbues Danny as he wakes up in the first comfortable place he's ever known. As someone who adopted a cat that spent six months under a reclining chair, emerging only to eat, it seems clear to me that Li studied such animals carefully in preparing for his role. Conlan is an unconventional casting choice for the daughter role, for instead of being the kind of sultry vixen one would expect in a film like this, she's actually quite dorky-looking, with braces, an awful hairstyle, and the kind of innocent demeanor that seems to no longer exist in girls past the age of nine. The very freshness of her character lends a lovely unexpected eroticism to a scene in Danny allows her to remove his collar for the first time outside the context of a fight.

I'm not sure how well this film will keep its opening weekend audience, because it's being marketed as a Jet Li action vehicle, but it is really a redemption story, one about the power of family, of memory, of art and culture, and of love. Yet what makes this film special is that for all of its preposterousness, for all the gore and the violence and the ugliness of the world in which Bob Hoskins' character and his henchmen live, and for all the sheer Dickensian sentimentality of scenes such as one in which Danny lingers on the letter "L" in his alphabet book, fascinated by its depiction of a mother and child for the word "Love", it manages to hold together. We believe in these unlikely caricatures of people despite plot inconsistencies you could drive a truck through. We believe that Danny exists, for all that he knows what a piano is, but doesn't seem to understand what "ripe" means. Never once does Li allow Danny to fall into the Forrest Gump trap of being a kind of idiot savant.

Rogue Pictures may want to market this film to the Quentin Tarantino audience, but in a frame near the end of the film, as the camera seems to iris in on Jet Li's face as he listens to a piano sonata in recital, bathing it in golden light at the center of the screen, it becomes clear that it's not Quentin Tarantino whom Leterrier is trying to emulate, it's D.W. Griffith, and that in UNLEASHED he's simply created a race-reversed, happy-ending remake of Broken Blossoms.

-- Jill Cozzi

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