Twin Dragons

When I was out running errands in St. Louis a couple weeks back, I found this 8-movie collection of Jackie Chan flicks (including Operation Condor and Armour of God), for $5. Whoo! Alex was here last weekend, and it was funny to see him read the brief descriptions on the back of the box and keep changing his mind which one he wanted to watch.

In Twin Dragons, Jackie plays twin brothers separated a birth in an incident involving a badly injured criminal and some random cop who rappelled out a window on a bed sheet and got dragged behind an ambulance after getting shot in the shoulder. Even unnamed background characters in Jackie Chan movies are freaking badass.

The son who isn't lost returns to America with his parents, and John becomes an accomplished composer and pianist (and apparently Jackie Chan can play the piano, so he's doing at least some of the actually playing in this movie). The other son, found by some very intoxicated young woman on her way home from a night out, is named "Boomer" and grows up to become an auto mechanic.

Boomer's idiot friend Tyson gets them in trouble with some gang over a girl he likes (played by Maggie Cheung), at the same time John arrives in Hong Kong for a big performance. Cue misunderstandings, unintentional role swapping and romance hijinks.

Alex and I were pretty stoked when, within the first ten minutes, Boomer is fighting an entire gang of guys in some sort of karaoke bar that is decorated to look like a Paris streetside cafe, and he's using a microphone as a flail. The movie has fun with the notion that each brother can unwittingly control the other's movements during moments of, I guess extreme stress or concentration. So Boomer finds his fingers moving oddly during times when John is playing piano, or John finds himself bouncing around crazily when Boomer is in a high speed boat chase.

The effects they use to get two Jackie's on-screen simultaneously aren't bad. It's most noticeable to me when one of them is supposed to brush past the other (as in the bathroom scene when they first meet), and you can tell the clothing doesn't move the way it should. On the whole, for an early '90s movie, not bad, and the film does a couple of funny bits with John and Boomer trying to keep someone in the dark about there being two of them.

The big drag on the movie is Tyson, who is a completely useless comic relief character, there almost entirely to make every situation worse. And he's so incredibly annoying, during the big end fight in the car testing facility, Alex and were both hoping that he'd get killed when the car he was in got put through the crash test.

Sadly, while lacking in any other signs of intelligence besides recognizing Maggie Cheung is pretty, Tyson does wear his seat belt.