In the middling new action movie War, a pair of vicious crime families learns the hard way that it's a huge mistake to put too much trust in an enigmatic, bloodthirsty assassin called Rogue. Jet Li plays that rogue operative as an arch-criminal so icily effective that he quickly becomes an urban legend in the underworld, a walking ghost story for wrongdoers to tell each other. Li's international criminal of mystery stokes the flames of a San Francisco gang war by playing both sides against each other. The film apparently would like to think of his game as a high-stakes chess match, but given the sluggish B-movie trappings and one-dimensional characters, it's more like a blood-soaked game of checkers.
