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| Movies,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F3
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Everyone’s fighting in the kung-fu style these days - every action star goes in feet first, and generally since ‘The Matrix’ came out, it’s all filmed using special tricky-tricks to make the lamest actors look black belt standard. Not your man Jackie Chan – he’s been whipping bamboo canes dangerously around his head for over thirty years. Starting off as a bit part getting his neck snapped by Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’, he then blazed from the 70’s to the 90’s making literally hundreds of chopsocky flicks, films where the greater emphasis was on pratfalling and comedy than blood and revenge, and large parts of the budget were allotted to hospital bills following Jack’s many near-fatal stunt cock-ups. Now Chan is finally breaking up paving in Hollywood (unless you count his moments in the ‘Cannonball run’ films ), and with two biggish hits behind him, is out again in ‘Shanghai Noon’ already a hit in der states.
Now your average Jackie movie isn’t ever going to win any originality awards, he’s made great work of repeating the same formula in almost all his films. His Hong Kong output consisted of 2 parts comedy mugging and falling over into cakes/wearing funny hats stuff, one part daffy romance, and one part amazing stunts. Imagine Frank Spencer with numchukkas. Hollywood producers don’t seem to quite trust banking on this, and in his latest films have partnered him up with wise-cracking American sidekicks to keep things nice and generic.
In this latest film, set in the wild west, he’s an imperial guard from the Forbidden City, sent to the west to bring back a beautiful princess, and ends up paired up with valley talking bandit Owen Wilson in the process. It’s all easy on the brain stuff, and plays along childish gag-lines that haven’t been seen since the Police Academy films. Thankfully, Owen Wilson is pretty cool, and gets most of the best comedy re-action stuff in the film. Our Jackie does the fish-out-water comedy virtually blue-printed from his previous success ‘Rush Hour’ effectively, and leaves most of his efforts for the amazing set-piece stunt scenes. There’s a fraction of the action (rhyme!!!) usually ladled out in his previous work, but what there is still peerless – a cool horseshoe lasso fight, an acrobatic tree bouncing punch up with some injuns, and a bizarre saloon brawl all take the biscuit. Only the final showdown disappoints, because the action keeps cutting between Jackie’s fight with the bad Chinese guy in the bell tower and Wilson’s gunfight with the evil Marshall, and gets lost in between. It’s also a weirdly long film for this kind of light-weight fodder, and during the last half hour I found myself wondering why they weren’t winding things up, and as a result my mind started to wander. Nevertheless, his best American film to date, and leagues ahead of fatty Samo Hung and his ‘Martial Law’.
UK rating:
PG
US rating:
PG
Tom Dey 2000 USA
Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Owen Wilson, Curtis Armstrong, Sammo Hung.
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