In Sun-Tze’s The Art of War, the ruler is advised that the best way to defeat an enemy is through efforts to weaken a state from inside. This epigram is perhaps the only wisdom to be derived from the fast-paced The Art of War, directed by Christian Duguay. We see a lot of action, punctuated with glances at hand-held computers, with very little explanation for all the violence. However, snippets of information are imparted throughout the film, so discovering the plot is the main mystery, and the violence only begins to make sense at the end of the film. Or does it? The tagline of the film is "Do you know who your enemy is?," though in my opinion one word is misspelled, as the film sorely needs an enema. One candidate for enemy is ambitious United Nations Secretary-General Douglas Thomas (played by Donald Sutherland), a Canadian who wants China to sign an important free trade agreement which, in his opinion, will guarantee world peace and strengthen the UN. However, his mentality as a simpleton is revealed by his only nugget of wisdom in the film: "There is no free lunch; you have to pay the piper." His apparent principal adviser, UN Security Chief Eleanor Hooks (played by Anne Archer), an American who somehow keeps her right-wing loyalties and ties secret, is another candidate for enemy, as she does not want the Chinese to sign the treaty so that corporate interests in the United States will not lose out. Accordingly, she hires an assassin to put a bullet through the head of yet another candidate for enemy, Chinese UN Ambassador Wu (played by James Hong), while simultaneously assigning our hero Neil Shaw (played by Wesley Snipes) and his team of covert UN operatives to maintain security for the Chinese ambassador. Hooks carefully fails to share what she calls the "big picture" with Shaw. Despite Shaw’s effort to chase and nearly catch the killer, he’s captured by other enemies -- the police and coke-snorting FBI agent Frank Cappella (played by Maury Chaykin) -- as the presumed assassin. When Chinese Triads (other enemies?) abduct Shaw, believing that he was behind a plot to murder Chinese stowaways in New York harbor, Shaw escapes and tries to exculpate himself of the assassination. Somehow Julia Fang (played by Marie Matiko), the UN’s Chinese-English translator, is convinced of his innocence (at gunpoint), and she becomes his assistant in the pursuit of the real assassin, but both ultimately are killed after Shaw goes on various chases and takes various leaps from tall buildings. Rather than allowing the hero and heroine to die ignominiously, during the final frames the screenwriters have them reappear on the French Riviera, presumably given a second life by God, but certainly not by intelligent filmviewers, who will have abandoned The Art of War long before the epilog. MH

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The Art of War
by Sun Tzu, Samuel B. Griffith

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle....

- Sun Tzu