The idea is almost too good to be true:  Shakespeare’s timeless romance set in modern time and packed full of guns, kung fu and interracial dating.  Here, burgeoning action star Jet Li and songbird Aaliyah play the two crazy kids that fall for each other even though their respective fathers are the heads of two feuding gangs in Oakland.  But they don’t really fall for each other.  And nobody is actually named “Romeo.”  So you’re on your own trying to figure out where the title came from.

Aaliyah, making an astonishingly respectable film debut, plays Trish, the daughter of the diabolical Isaak O’Day (Delroy Lindo, The Cider House Rules).  She hates her father, distancing herself from his criminal way of life, even though his dirty money probably paid for the boutique that she runs.  After the son of another Oakland gangleader is killed, Trish is ordered to have round-the-clock protection (in the form of the chubby Anthony Anderson, Liberty Heights) in fear of retaliation.

Li (Black Mask) plays Han, the son of O’Day’s deadly rival, Chu (Henry O, Brokedown Palace).  As the film opens, Han is locked up in a dingy Hong Kong prison, but quickly escapes after receiving word that his brother has been knocked off.  He blazes into Oakland intent on finding and killing the person responsible and, in the process, meets Trish as he is stealing a cab and she is trying to ditch her porky protector.  The two team up to get to the bottom of the whole war, which revolves around a slimy white guy (Edoardo Ballerini, The Last Days of Disco) trying to bring an NFL expansion team to the city’s four miles of waterfront property that Isaak and Chu are fighting over.  Each ganglord comes complete with a opulent mansion and a Machiavellian right-hand man (Isaiah Washington, True Crime; and Russell Wong, The Prophecy II, respectively).

But there isn’t any real romance between Trish and Han.  They merely run around trying to piece the puzzle together, and the result is more Encyclopedia Brown & Nancy Drew than Romeo & Juliet…if Brown was a martial arts master and Drew was a red-hot R&B siren.  There’s a missed-it-if-you-blinked balcony scene, but with only the threat of romance, Romeo plays more like a rerun of Remington Steele or Moonlighting.  Only with karate – which isn’t really such a bad thing.

Li’s fight scenes are amazing and there honestly shouldn’t be anybody going to see this film for any other reason.  DMX fans might be geared up for it, but the rapper is only in two brief scenes (he was in Belly longer, so rent that instead).  There are three really nifty moments when Li is beating the crap out of his rivals, who are depicted x-ray-style so you can actually see their bones breaking - kind of like the whole bullet-through-the-gut scenes in Three Kings, but not nearly as cool.  Romeo is the directorial debut of Andrzej Bartkowiak, who previously worked with Li as the cinematographer on Lethal Weapon 4.

Romeo might be Li’s big breakout role in this hemisphere, but it probably should be remembered for its horrible racist edge.  Can someone explain to me how a black guy can call an Asian guy “Dim Sum” and “Rice Noodle” throughout an entire film?  Imagine a white actor calling a black actor “Porch Monkey” and “Spear Chucker” in a movie (and then imagine Spike Lee going into cardiac arrest).  And who greenlighted the Chinese gong sound after Chu’s mandate about the importance of timing their strike against Isaak?  The official description from the studio says that the film is about a war between Asian and African-American gangs, but Romeo never uses either of those PC monikers, opting instead for “black” and, at best, “Chinese.”  And if you pay attention too closely to the convoluted script, you’ll walk away thinking that the message of the film is that blacks solve their problems with guns, while the Chinese use their hands and feet.

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