Alex stayed over last Friday, and while we didn't get much Crimson Skies in because he kept having motion sickness problems, we did finally watch Jackie Chan versus pirates!
Except, there's hardly any pirates for the first hour of the movie. Dragon (Jackie) is part of a coast guard that hasn't had much success even finding the pirates to try and stop them, and when their ships get blown up, the British colonel in charge of the colony dissolves their unit and incorporates them into the police. Dragon already annoyed both the captain in charge of the police with his insolence, and the captain's nephew who is put in charge of training them, so it's a tough sledding. Enough so Dragon gets fed up and quits when he's ordered to apologize to a businessman who's consorting with criminals. After kicking the criminal over a second-story balcony.
After that, he gets roped into helping an old friend of his (Sammo Hung) to recover some stolen rifles. Dragon thinks they're doing a good deed, but his friend just plans to sell them to the pirates. That causes some problems, but does eventually get them on course to actually fighting pirates.
The plot seems to meander up to then, or maybe it was just hard to hear what was going on. The sound on the DVD is set ridiculously low. I normally have my TV set around 20-25 to watch anything, but even at 50 I couldn't always tell what people were saying. There's a not even half-developed romantic sub-subplot between Dragon and a young lady that I think is there mostly as an attempt to inject extra comedy. The two of them trying to escape, and Dragon having to do all sorts of stuff to help her because she's such a delicate flower.
I don't think it was necessary, because Jackie and Sammo do such a good job on the comedy themselves. There's a whole running gag on the pirate's island about characters not recognizing each other and asking for passwords.
I am disappointed to report Jackie Chan does not fight any pirates on a ship. Which is a real missed opportunity. The amount of shit he could have done, swinging around on ropes or scrambling up masts? That said, the action sequences in this are excellent, even if Alex and I were once again left wondering how the hell Jackie Chan is still alive. He falls from a clock tower, through 2 cloth overhangs and then it looks like he breaks his neck hitting the ground. And he just, gets up.
That was the culmination of a lengthy fight/chase scene that involved Jackie and Sammo fighting a bunch of guys and each other across town, Jackie escaping the police captain's handcuffs and stealing his bicycle. Which leads into a bicycle chase through a series of narrow alleys where Jackie's grabbing random poles to use as lances. Or leaping off the bike over a ladder. Or planting his legs against the walls while gripping the handlebars and swinging the front tire into a guy's face. Then he escapes the captain's custody again, and ends up fighting inside the clocktower among all the gears and moving parts. Heck, the fight that culminates in Dragon leaving the police is guys seemingly just getting wrecked. Kicked down stairs, over railings to crash on the floor, pinned to the ceiling with hat racks.
So there were definitely things I would have liked more of in the movie, but what we got was pretty cool.
2 comments:
Project A is superb, one of Jackie's best, but yeah, it promises pirates but doesn't really deliver pirates.
I'm not sure I've seen a HK pirate movie, now that I think of it, which is odd given the existence of Zheng Yi Sao. How there isn't a 1994 film abut her called Queen of the Pirates starring Maggie Cheung or Michelle Yeoh, I have no idea.
I will say i enjoyed the fight with the pirate captain at the end, although Alex and I were trying to figure out if he had the Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II fake pecs, or he was really in that good a shape, but yeah, I was expecting a bit ship-to-ship battle between the pirates and the coastal defense guys at some point.
There's a, I think Korean, pirates movie (possible called Pirates!) from the last year or so on Netflix I keep meaning to watch, but I'm never in the mood to read subtitles for 140 minutes. I might have to nose around to see if there are any decent Hong Kong pirate action movies now.
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