I've never actually watched this before and it was on Netflix, so it's the first movie I watched on the channel my friend made specially for me on her account.
(Because I was using the one she created for her sister, and her sister was getting sick of the suggestions that cropped up from the stuff I was watching.)
So Keung (Jackie Chan) comes to the Bronx to look after his uncle's apartment while he's away on his honeymoon, and falls afoul of a multi-ethnic gang of hoodlums. It's rather touching actually. Angry people from all over united in their love of riding dirtbikes and smashing stuff with baseball bats.
Then that gets mostly sidelined in favor of a plotline about a rich white guy that wants some stolen diamonds that wound up in the possession of boy in the wheelchair that lives across the hall from Keung's nephew. Which is how you end up with the cops chasing a hovercraft through the streets of "New York". It's hilarious, all the attempts to stop it, the chaos, and especially how Keung ultimately takes the thing out, but kind throws the whole movie onto an entirely different track.
Especially since the shift reduces the amount of time Chan and Anita Mui are on-screen together. She's playing Elaine, who buys Keung's uncle's market, and has trouble with the gang of dirtbike goons. The two play off each other very well in the two other movies I've seen them in together (Legend of Drunken Master and Black Dragon), so more of that would only have been a good thing.
That said, the fight and chase sequences are as energetic and entertaining as I hoped they'd be. The fight in the market, there were times Jackie Chan was moving so fast I thought they'd put the fight on fast-forward, but no, it was just him, being ridiculously fast.
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This short burst of Hong-Kong-actors-in-North-America films all have a bit of a weird feel, almost like cheap knock-offs of what they were doing back at home because they didn't know what else to do. Jackie Chan moved on to a buddy comedy formula and that worked well for him, but I don't think anyone else managed to crack it.
The film does have a weird, slapped together feel, like they combined elements from two or three films as best they could, and the pacing and character development is dodgy. But it does have a fun sense of anything being possible.
I can't think of anyone else that hung around for very long. I guess Jet Li had some limited success, but certainly not on Jackie's level. I read something that said Jackie Chan started doing buddy comedies because he knew he physically wasn't going to be able to keep doing the same stuff forever, and he wanted audiences to get used to seeing him in different films. Which is smart thinking.
Yep, he's moved into more dramatic roles of late too, so he knows how to manage his brand.
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