10 Things You Didn’t Know About Kiss of the Dragon

Jet Li’s arrival in the U.S. as an action star was one that many applauded. He was a freaking force of nature in China, starring in unmistakably awesome movies like Fist of Legend, Black Mask, and the Once Upon A Time in China series, but his first foray into Hollywood had him appearing opposite Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon 4 as a villain! Needless to say, it went well and his next role was in the turd sandwich that was Romeo Must Die. Maybe it was the fact that two of the main characters were played by musicians or maybe it was because they didn’t let Jet Li be the amazing martial artist that he is on screen. Die hard fans of Jet didn’t like it and voiced their opinion and Kiss of the Dragon is how he responded. Let’s take a look at 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Kiss of the Dragon.

1. Directing legend Luc Besson and Jet Li had spoke about doing an action thriller set in Paris and that is how this movie got started. Somewhere along the line first-time director Chris Nahon became involved and they set out to make a film that would help to cure the anger from Jet Li’s first attempt at a Western action movie.

2. Bridget Fonda had worked with Besson in the past and saw some of Jet Li’s stuff so she accepted the role without ever reading the script. It was something that she never did and caused her a bit of concern knowing that it was going to be tons of action and she wasn’t told to do much in the way of getting into physical shape. She didn’t get a chance to see a script until she was doing her first wardrobe test so you can imagine her surprise when she started trying on clothes for a street hooker on the streets of Paris.

3. There were only two real CGI shots in the entire film. The flames that flew out of the laundry chute after Jet slid out of it and the grenade exploded and the pool ball kick in the lobby of the hotel.

4. They didn’t want Jet’s character to be Rambo. The effort was made to make him seem scared and desperate because he knew nothing about the city and everywhere he seemed to go he was met by uniformed and undercover cops. That his why he was so fast to trust Fonda’s character and her ability to help him.

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5. The big, buff, black dude was a boxer who was performing in his first film. The set was essentially designed to be destroyed by him and Jet.

6. The fight that Jet has against the 25 men who were conveniently trying in martial arts was originally going to be filmed over a three day span. It was going to be long days of filming where these guys were going to be beating the crap out of each other but it was eventually changed to a different set so they would have more time to shoot.

7. The brutality of the fight between Jet Li’s character and the 25 men caused several injuries during the shoot. The fight scenes from his other American movies were endlessly being berated because there was too much CGI and wire work. I see this scene as his apology to his fans as he stomps a mud hole in their ass using both his weapons and non-organic ones.

8. It was Jet’s idea to use acupuncture in the film. He had used it in a film at some point while working in China and it seemed like it was just unique and exotic enough to fly in a Western movie. The final scene with awesome bad guy Tcheky Karyo saw him get shot in the right arm, which was his dominate arm, and it causes him to use his mouth to pull and stick the man with the needle.

9. The “kiss of the dragon” is not an actual acupuncture thing, per se. It is said that there is a place where you can stick a needle and it will cause some of this stuff to happen in your body but it most certainly isn’t named “kiss of the dragon”.

10. The movie didn’t have a title for a while. When they first told Jet Li that it was going to be named “Kiss of the Dragon” he wasn’t a huge fan. It felt to him like it was trying too hard to rip off the 70’s Brucesploitation films and about 30 years too late. He was both right and wrong on that because they were trying to jump on board of a bandwagon but it wasn’t Bruce that they were riding, it was the recently released and very successful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that they wanted to emulate.