But all this is never explained so much as occasionally whispered or randomly overheard. You'd need old Sun Tzu himself to figure the damn thing out. So forget story and move on the the movie's true reason for being, the three principles it believes in, derived less from Sun Tzu than from those deep thinkers at Warner Bros. marketing. Wesley Snipes is neat. Asian women are beautiful.
Style is everything.
The first is indisputably true. But generally, this isn't a performance, it's a presence, meant not to convince but to mesmerize. As for the Asian women, they are everywhere, and the camera loves to study the delicacy of their cheekbones, the porcelain of their skin, the depth of their dark eyes, the tenderness of their lips. Matiko is the best thing in the picture, sassy, funny, smart, capable of standing up to and even diminishing the great Snipes charisma. How much neater if she'd have disposed of the psycho with her own flying dragon spin kick, then saved Snipes.