Kiss of the Dragon (2001)

[4K display]

It pains me to post this:

Video 1.5/5

VIDEO:


The video reeks of low grade film or DVD. After seeing the trailer in HD on another Fox title, I feared the worst from this one. And that fear is what I found. It's in detail where this one suffers most. Resolution is extremely wanting by HD standards and fairly wanting even for SD more often than not. The soft lighting and general look of the film doesn't seem to help detail stand out either. Oddly though, the film starts very well, showing a reasonable amount of detail for a title mastered over five years ago. But resolution drops off suddenly and never fully recovers more than a glimpse here and a glimpse there. And there aren't too many of those.

Colors are tainted by the lighting, but lack the brilliance and clarity we've grown accustomed to. The film has a very seedy, dingy look that seems appropriate to the setting and story. But if this is all the photography's got, it's a very poor choice for an opening wave of titles set to sell people on the format.

I don't know what happened with this one, or even if anything did. Compression doesn't appear to have a heavy hand, nor should it considering the drought of extras. I expect the video is superior than SD, but this felt like watching DVD far too much.
35mm

After reading Chad's review I looked around for some D-Theater version reviews (mediocre to average) and it seems something went terribly wrong with this BD. Oh well I wasn't buying this title anyway..hopefully this is Fox's one dud done with and out of the way.