Kathryn Morris UK

This past week has seen the worldwide release of the latest in the Bourne series of movies.  It has taken the box office lead from the hugely successful The Dark Knight Rises.

Jeremy Renner (28 Days Later and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) plays the lead character in The Bourne Legacy.  He is not, however, Jason Bourne.  Rather than cover the loss of Matt Damon by just having a different actor play Bourne they’ve created a new character, Aaron Cross, and devised a scenario whereby Cross is dealing with the legacy (I see what they did there) of events from the previous film.  It’s still very much a Bourne film in style though.

Renner is already a successful actor having worked in many big films but has yet to receive the widespread recognition that a role like leading a Bourne movie will bring him.  The kind of press attention that a summer blockbuster gets will inevitably include a re-evaluation of Jeremy’s career to date.  They will pour over his body of work to determine what kind of actor he his, whether Bourne suits him, and if he will become a new sought-after ‘A-lister’.

One film that is very unlikely to get a mention in those retrospectives is: Paper Dragons.

But what, I hear you ask, do this have to do with Kathryn?

Jeremy Renner worked with Kathryn Bigelow when she directed him in The Hurt Locker of course…  What?  Oh, you mean that Kathryn 

Well in that case the answer should be obvious by now:  Kathryn co-starred with Jeremy in Paper Dragons.

It’s 1996 and Kathryn is in one of the busiest times of her career with roles in a number of TV shows and films.  Paper Dragons was one of the films.  It’s small.  It’s low budget (I hope).  It’s rubbish.

No, I hadn’t heard of it either until very recently and, in the same way that Renée Zellweger doesn’t include The Return Of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on her CV, I can’t imagine anyone is shouting about being involved in Paper Dragons either.  As well as playing the lead character, Adolfo Swaya is credited as the director and a writer.  It is pretty much his only Hollywood credit.  You can see why.  This is an early film project for a lot of those on screen, some have been come well known since.

The basic plot of Dragons is two small-time crooks Paul (Swaya) and Jack (Renner) deciding to rip-off a Chinese crime lord for his stash of drugs.  Big mistake.  He has a pair of bungling bent coppers (they provide some comic relief) on his payroll track them down and kill them.  But Paul is not quite dead and his dumped body is found by a group Chinese monks who take him in and teach him the ways of kung fu.  It’s a pretty typical “journey of discovery” story: he’s resistant at first but come around.  There’s a bit of a twist which stops it having the normal revenge element but it doesn’t stray far from the chosen path.

But what about Kathryn?

Kathryn plays Kate (a real stretch for the writers that one!), she’s the girlfriend of Jack and hangs out with him and Paul.  She’s a gangster’s moll, enjoying the benefits (i.e. drugs) available to them.  Initially she is in a party mood, and has some fun when they all go to buy some guns.  After the boys steal the drugs things take a darker turn.  As the film starts with Paul’s body being found by the monks much of this is actually done as flashbacks during Paul’s recovery.

Later, Paul returns to the city and finds Kate.  She’s in a bad way, having been caught by the Triad gang, addicted to drugs and forced in to prostitution.  Kathryn really acts her socks off in this her final scene.  It is not a comfortable watch, and I have no idea how accurate a portrayal of someone in that state it is, but it’s certainly very well done.  In comparison to some of the work by our male lead earlier in the film it is Oscar worthy.  As per usual Kathryn is the best thing in it.  Across her four scenes she manages around 10 minutes of screen time but Kate is not really significant to the plot.  She is not directly involved in the crime and isn’t the love interest our hero has to rescue.

Paper Dragons would love to be one of those thousands of cheap, knock-off martial arts movies where the protagonist learns life lessons and unarmed combat to right some wrong.  It would dearly love to be one of them but it is just not good enough.  That’s how bad it is.  The special effects are on par with Chubby Rain the film-within-a-film in Bowfinger, the Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Heather Graham comedy.  Some of the acting is laughably bad.  Once it gets past the initial set up and focuses on Paul’s path to enlightenment things do improve a little.  It’s not good though.  One for the KM and Jeremy Renner fans only then.  The US DVD is available cheaply so there is no excuse not to give it a go.

In the list of writers in the opening credits the director and star Adolfo Swaya’s name is misspelt!  That rather neatly sums the state of this film up.

I have to add in a “Kathryn is smoking” comment 😉  Unfortunately in this case I mean her character smokes.  She also injects drugs during the film.  There’s also some cursing 😮  You have been warned:  this is not the Kathryn we are used to seeing.

Added to the Gallery are 267 screencaps of Kathryn in Paper Dragons.  Unfortunately the picture quality on this film is very poor so despite my best efforts the screencaps reflect that.  We also have a trailer video, which includes bits from most of Kathryn’s scenes, and a box art image.