So after Alex and I finished watching Hobbs and Shaw two weekends ago, he wanted to watch this Jackie Chan movie he remembered loving when he was younger. So we did.
Jackie plays Jackie (or Condor, or Asian Hawk, IMdb has all three names listed), an archaeologist or treasure hunter, called in to help find some gold the Nazis hid in the Sahara at some point in the middle of World War 2. He ends up working with a trio of ladies: Ada (Carol Cheng), who is a historian or expert on the desert, Elsa (Eva Cobo) who is the granddaughter of the captain that hid the gold, and Momoko (Shoko Ikeda) who they just kind of meet in the desert. She knows the place in one of the photos Elsa has, so she leads them where they need to be.
There are at least a couple of groups on their tails, although one of those is a pair of guys who are supposed to be Arabic that are played as bungling jokes. There's a very cool chase scene through some city with Jackie on a dirtbike fleeing about 6 shitty black Yugos or something, including him diving repeatedly from one stack of crates to the next as cars plow through the them.
The trek across the desert gets interrupted by Elsa and Ada being captured by bandits who intend to sell them into slavery. Even though Jackie's 4-wheel drive jeep seems to wreck very shortly after the escape, those guys never show up again. They find the remains of the city they're looking for and get attacked by a bunch of spear-wielding locals, who are never seen again once the main bad guys appear.
The movie is actually very similar to Hobbs and Shaw in that the plot is just barely there enough to carry the movie from one excuse for Jackie Chan to do ridiculous shit to the next. It's just this movie plays it more for slapstick comedy than testosterone-fueled machismo, and there's no CGI.
Since I enjoy watching Jackie Chan do crazy stunts like fight two guys in a wind tunnel, or fight a bunch of guys on some teeter-totter platform out of a Super Mario 64 level, that works really well. Just watching the speed at which he does things sometimes. Or how he does something like tuck and roll through a door into a room, then pop up and press himself flat against the opposite wall in one smooth motion, is just really cool.
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This is the sequel to Armour of God, although it's got that weird thing Jackie Chan film series have where it's not clear if Jackie is really playing the same character or not. I've just discovered that they made a third one in 2012 that I haven't seen, so I'm going to need to track that down.
I'll have to tell my friend that. He'll probably want to see them, too.
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