Hidden Strike (2023)

Watching this at 2 a.m. might not have been the best plan, but Alex needed something to watch and it wasn't like I had to keep track of an intricate plot.

Jackie Chan is Dragon Luo, head of an elite mercenary team hired to retrieve some big oil company's employees from a refinery is some ill-defined Middle East country. John Cena plays a guy named Chris, himself a former mercenary who dropped out of that life to be a helpful guy around a village in the ill-defined Middle East country. Chris' brother is hired to take someone from the convoy Dragon's leading and Chris signs on because the money could really help the village, and the person they're abducting is supposed to be a scumbag.

Surprise! The "scumbag" is actually just the person with control over the refinery's pumps, because the guy Chris is working for wants to steal half a billion gallons of oil. Chris bows out (after completing the abduction) and eventually reluctantly teams up with Dragon and Dragon's estranged daughter Mei (played by Chunrui Ma).

Like I said, the plot is just barely there. The mastermind - played by someone Alex described as playing some asshole on Game of Thrones, which hardly narrows it down (it's Pilou Asbaek) - kills Chris' brother after Chris leaves for not getting Chris to stick around (I think) and tells the rest of his goon squad to make it look like Dragon's team did it for payback. I assume partially to cover his tracks, but also to get Chris to go after Dragon, keeping both of them off his back.

Except it doesn't work. Chris and Dragon do fight - Cena's willingness to look silly works well with Jackie Chan's brand of fight scenes, plus Cena's a big guy who can look impressive throwing Chan around - but at no point does Chris seem to think the Chinese mercs are responsible. They're both just angry and talking past each other and punching.

Also, Mei being angry with her father not being there when her mother died doesn't really come off much after the first time it's brought up. Dragon keeps assuring her he'll protect her, or he'll come back, and I guess you could read her strained smiles and quiet nods as her not quite buying it or not allowing herself to buy in, but the overt hostility falls away.

But the movie is mostly relying on Chan and Cena's interactions as an enemies to friends scenario, and that works pretty well. Cena's solid at comedy and willing to look foolish, so they get some mileage from Dragon and Mei each independently reacting to Chris' tendency to name his trucks and be protective of them. Or Chris digging himself a hole telling Dragon about how hot he thinks Mei is, not realizing he's speaking to her dad.

Although the well they go to the most is miscommunication, but not really the language barrier stuff like in Rush Hour. Turns out Chris speaks Chinese (mostly), and Dragon knows one word in French (which seems to be less than Jackie Chan knows in real life), but since it's hard to discuss plans during shootouts they keep trying to use hand signals and it keeps going awry. Dragon's version of "six o'clock" looks more like a surfer doing a "gnarly" gesture (the thumb and pinky extended the other fingers closed).

In conclusion, plot's weak, some of the character beats are underdeveloped, but there's at least a few funny lines or scenes and some of the action sequences are solid and make good use of the leads skills.

Project A Part 2

A sequel to Project A, the "Jackie Chan fights pirates" movie that involved surprisingly little of Jackie Chan fighting pirates*. This time, Dragon (that'd be Jackie Chan) gets transferred from the Naval Infantry to the police to expose an inspector who's been paying people to commit crimes for him to stop so he looks good. Then he busts out the old ley de fuga** on them afterward so there's no chance of anyone finding out.

Except, the movie is not content with that. Or it doesn't think that's enough plot to provide opportunities for good fight scenes and chase sequences. Dragon not only finds the entire precinct, save one rookie, is crooked, he also gets tied up in the plot of a group of people looking to end control of the Manchu Dynasty over Hong Kong. Meaning there are also agents of the Empress running around, mostly in suits and bowler hats, looking for a book that would outline the rebel network. Plus, a small group of survivors from the pirates he took down in the first movie are moving around, trying for revenge on the guy they hold responsible for killing their captain.

In practice, the pirates are mostly comic relief, as the one time Dragon fights them, he's handcuffed to the bent cop. So there's a lot of gags about them getting tangled up taking different route around obstacles, or Dragon throwing a punch, but it causes the inspector's hand to punch Dragon, that sort of thing. There's also a brief scene where Dragon helps them out, which the pirates have to decide how to interpret. 

The movie is rather open that a lot of the populace don't trust the cops, believe them to just be bullies who abuse their authority. Of course, the movie also takes the "few bad apples" approach, that this is due to guys like Inspector Chun and his precinct accepting bribes and overlooking crimes. This seems difficult to argue when the bent cops in the precinct outnumber the honest ones at least 2-to-1 (and that's counting Dragon and his four buddies from Naval Infantry on the good side, otherwise it's closer to 10-to-1).

But it does feel like Dragon's assignment gets lost in the shuffle for a long stretch in the back half, once he gets tangled up in the rebel stuff. It's initially related to his job, since the rebels work with Chun to discredit Dragon because it gets them money, but you could be forgiven for forgetting how Dragon got tangled up in this in the first place.

Let's talk interesting fights or chase sequences. I don't think there's anything on par with the bicycle sequence in the alley from the first movie, but the ending is an extended, running battle between Dragon and 3 of the Empress' agents across a series of bamboo scaffolds. This includes a part where Dragon, in desperation, chews up a bunch of hot peppers, then smears the juice on his hands so he can fight by smacking the guys across the eyes with it. Gross, and not hygienic, but creative. Early on, when Dragon decides to start cleaning up the precinct by hitting the biggest crime boss, there's a lengthy fight in the guys gambling hall that involves some long odds. So long that even Dragon trying to use a ladder doesn't help! When Jackie can't triumph, even with a ladder, you know it's trouble.

On the negative, there's a long bit in the middle of the movie where Dragon and the rookie visit a girl they know who's cousin is supposed to be missing, and who is connected to the rebels. In fact, one of the rebels is there at the same time. Along with two of the Empress' guys. And the bent inspector. And the Commissioner. So it's a whole thing of people scrambling around, trying to hide from each other under beds or inside closets while the Commissioner is trying to be charming and fix a leaky faucet. Yeah, I don't know. It can't all be backflips and face kicks, I guess.

* I tried looking up "hong kong pirate movies" online, and all I could find was one called "The Pirate" from 1973. There's gotta be something other than that, right?

** Shot while escaping, essentially. Or rather, "escaping". I'm reading another book on the Mexican Revolution, the phrase comes up a lot.

Project A

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.

Police Story 2

Police Story 2 picks up not much after the end of the first movie. Chu Tao has been arrested and convicted, but Officer Chan caused so much property damage he's been demoted to traffic cop. Sadly, this does not result in Jackie Chan pulling any sick stunts on a motorcycle. Bummer.

Initially, the movie looks as though it'll be about Chu Tao trying to take revenge. He's able to be paroled because he's contracted an illness that's going to kill him in three months, and I guess he can't think of anything better to do with his money. Despite various threats against both Chan and his girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung), all they really succeed in doing is breaking the couple up. Mostly by bringing May's fears that Chan's always going to be devoted to his job first, and she'll just be a distant second.

While the relationship drama carries through the movie, Chu Tao drops out partway, replaced with a group of bombers trying to extort money from a large company. So there's scenes of the surveillance unit Chan joins trying to track the suspected bomber across town and through subways to his hideout and things like that. There's also a part where Chan tries to approach the guy selling the explosives while wearing a cheesy fake '70s mustache, which made me laugh every time I saw it.

The movie climaxes in a fight between Officer Chan and the crew of bombers in an old factory loaded with all kinds of fun stuff. Explosives, flammable stuff, chutes and ladders. It's a wonderful feeling when you see the setting and just know rad shit is about to happen. Jackie gets knocked down some immense funnel thing at one point and keeps bouncing off slanted metal surfaces for about three stories. Earlier on, I was really stoked when Chan chases this one annoying goon of Chu Tao's (who keeps getting his glasses busted by Jackie) into a playground, because you know they're gonna have fun with the slides and jungle gyms.

Not nearly as many people getting thrown through windows in this as the first movie, but still quite a few people with bleeding skulls if the credits are anything to go by. I know they're all trained professionals, but it's amazing to me any of these people survived this stuff.

Police Story

I had a coughing fit that kept me up last Friday night, which is how I found out HBO Max' Turner Classic Movies selection includes Police Story. I intended to watch Seven Samurai, but oh well. Jackie Chan trumps Akira Kurosawa, I guess. At least at 2 a.m. he does.

Jackie's character is the cop who captures notorious heroin dealer Chu Tao after an extended chase through a shantytown (and I mean through it, they drove their cars through it) and on the side of a double-decker bus. This gets Chan tabbed as the public face of the police department, which is about when everything goes wrong.

He's assigned to protect Chu Tao's assistant so she can testify, even though she has no interest in testifying. So the cops stage an attack on her by the most incompetent, overacting "killer" ever. So that backfires and Chu Tao's lawyer talks his way free with a lot of fancy bullshit about sunrise (even though it was clearly daylight during the sting) and mysterious other buses.

And if Chu Tao were smart, he'd take the win and leave it at that. He's free, Chan's humiliated and demoted to a desk job, Salina not only didn't snitch, she helped ruin the case against him. But Chu Tao's got to push things. Try to silence Salina permanently, and ruin Chan's career.

The movie's kind of slow until the last fifteen minutes. There's a whole bit where he brings Salina to his apartment and his girlfriend's waiting (because it's his birthday) and draws the wrong conclusions. That whole bit goes on for a while. When he's demoted, there's another extended scene with him trying to have five phone conversations at once because everybody else left out of laziness. I was starting to want the movie to just end already.

Looking at the movie on the whole after it's done, I can understand the latter scene better. It shows how far he's fallen, that Chu Tao really could just take the win and be satisfied. That he doesn't, means I have no compunctions about him, his men, or especially his sleazebag lawyer getting what's waiting.

Because the last fifteen minutes is when we get an extended fight/chase scene in a mall where freaking everybody is getting thrown through glass. Jackie's kicking dudes down escalators and being thrown over railings to fall a couple of stories through a trellis. A guy tries to run over him with a motorcycle, Jackie pulls him off, then rams into him with it, drives him through a half-dozen glass windows and slams him into a wall (while they guy is crotched on the front tire.) I'm assuming they're using some sort of safety glass (I sure hope so) but it's still a little terrifying.

Then the very end is very abrupt. Chan doesn't restrain himself from beating the shit out of Chu Tao, or his lawyer, while all the other cops either look away or hold the guys in place. Which, OK, Chan needs to get some payback, sure fine. Chu Tao's a dick, I'm fine seeing him get kicked through a display case. But the movie just stops there, in the midst of that ass-kicking. Salina's cleared his name, but there's no real closure between the two of them. May, Chan's girlfriend, got kicked down two flights of stairs and he never goes to see how she's doing. Jackie Chan was directing the movie, so apparently he wanted the audience to leave amped up to fight somebody. No cool down denouement with tender moments in this movie!

The Accidental Spy

Jackie Chan plays an exercise equipment salesman who learns the father he never knew what a Korean spy. Before the man dies, he leaves Jackie some things which lead him to Turkey, where he gets tangled up in some huge search for a new, extremely potent version of opium. Or heroin, something like that, it was hard to tell because the voices were all very soft. I normally have the volume on my TV set from 17-24, and I dialed it up to 45 and it was still hard to hear. And the DVD had no closed caption options. 

How dare this 8-movie DVD collection I bought for 5 bucks not have more bells and whistles? Seriously, though, it made it difficult to follow the story beyond that. There's an evil drug lord named Li that worked with Jackie's dad, but there's also a group of Turkish guys who I think actually grew the drugs. Their boss is always yelling at Jackie in Turkish, no matter how many times Jackie makes it clear he doesn't speak the language. I thought only people from the U.S. did that. 

Either way, the end result is Jackie keeps getting attacked by different large groups of angry people. At one point his taxi drives into a open field and guys jump out of nine more taxis and attack him. Later he's attacked at a Turkish bath and winds up running through a bazaar butt-naked, fighting a bunch of guys who are very determined to not let him cover himself. Also led to Jackie trying to cover himself with a bowl of cayenne pepper, which couldn't have been pleasant.

And because there's a hit new drug at stake, the CIA is involved. Because they want to keep that drug out of the wrong hands. Yeah, I don't believe that either. Rather disappointed Jackie never kicked the CIA guy in the face. Perfect opportunity was right after the guy berated him for giving the drug to Li and how he should have left Jackie in the Turkish jail. Jackie was emotionally raw and out for vengeance by that point anyway.

But it's always about the cool stunts and creative lunacy they come up with. I got very excited when Jackie got on a motorcycle and played chicken with a small airplane. There's just so many ways that can go and they're all awesome.

Bleeding Steel

This, on the other hand, is not a good movie. Most of the fun Alex and I got out of it was joking about all the things that reminded us of other (mostly better) movies. That the main bad guy, who is a former special forces guy used a guinea pig to create a "bioroid", reminded us of the bad guys in Dark City. In terms of how he looks, not in any other way. And that his henchmen look like either the characters from the video game Destiny, or Daft Punk. The hypnotist reminded Alex of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.

We tried to get a lot of mileage out of that because the movie itself wasn't doing it for us. So the bioroid (which really just makes me think he's got hemorrhoids) was a special forces guy (named Andre of all things, terrifying) used as a guinea pig in a test of blood that helps make someone superhuman. Which required cutting out his heart and replacing it with a mechanical one. Quite why he had to be awake during that procedure I don't know, but the blood is killing him from the inside.

There's an improved version of the blood that lets you heal like Wolverine, but the human rights violating scientist put it inside Jackie Chan's daughter as she was dying of leukemia (after Jackie wasn't there because he was trying to protect said human rights violating scientist, what is with Jackie Chan playing cops who neglect their children?) This procedure somehow transferred the human rights violating scientist's memories inside Jackie's daughter, while wiping or suppressing her own. And Jackie went deep cover to protect her, so she went into the foster care system while he performed various menial jobs to watch over her. Like handyman at the orphanage, or food court cook.

Meanwhile, he's got an arsenal in his house that looks like something out of the weapons bunker in Terminator 2, or Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or, hell, I don't know, take your pick of movies with a room with a shitload of guns on the walls. And he's got a secret passage in the fireplace, and an automated security system to blow up the house, and he's presumed dead by the bad guys. 

So why the fuck can he not just raise his amnesiac daughter on his own in his Australia, instead of having to go through all these hoops to try and watch over her? The only reason Andre's able to find her (after 13 years) is because the human rights violating scientist's memories are emerging in her dreams and she's seeing a "witch" who puts her under hypnosis, then sells the recordings of the stuff she says about special blood and bio-engineered hearts to a fiction writer, who then publishes a novel about it. Wouldn't it have been better for her to have a support system to help deal with the emerging memories in a controlled, supportive setting?

And how the fuck does Andre have some giant flying battleship that apparently no one has detected and shot down in over ten years?

It's not like movies can't get away with this sort of nonsense, but it tends to require them to keep things moving fast enough you don't have time to question anything. This movie doesn't maintain that sort of pace. And it's trying to play mysterious with this one teenage boy character who is very interested in Jackie's daughter. You know, who he is, why he's interested in her. But the last thing a movie like this should encourage you to do is ask questions, because you aren't going to stop at the ones they want you to ask.

Police Story: Lockdown

I think this is the fourth of Jackie Chan's Police Story films, released in 2013. This one deals with Jackie's Inspector Zhong Wen getting trapped inside a nightclub with a bunch of hostages (including his estranged daughter), by the club's owner, Wu Jiang (Ye Liu). Not all of the hostages, including Zhong Wen, are there by chance, because the club owner has a very specific demand.

First off, Jackie Chan with close-cropped hair looks weird. Second and more relevantly, I figured initially this was going to be "Jackie Chan's Die Hard," which you have to admit, sound fucking awesome. It's not that, though, as there's only a little bit of Jackie sneaking around and trying to ambush the goons. Just enough for him to pick up a few clues to hint towards what Wu is after. But the movie is honest about that, because Wu knows Zhong is a cop, and that his daughter is there (because he's dating her), so any idiot would know to use her as a hostage to force Zhong to surrender, and Wu's not an idiot.

So the movie becomes more of a slow mystery/thriller, where you're trying to figure out what Wu is after, why he wants to speak with this one particular prisoner. And at the same time, there's a battle of wills between Zhong and Wu. Wu is constantly testing how serious Zhong is about trying to save people, and how badly he wants to protect his daughter. Zhong in turn is trying to tease apart what Wu is after, and resolve the situation without anyone dying, while the SWAT teams are getting ready to bust in. Lots of talking, where Wu usually seems to be trying for a weak point, and Zhong is just staying on course.

The film does this thing where Zhong will consider a course of action in his mind, and we see it play out, then the camera cuts back to him and he ends up doing something different. Kind of like in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies, where he'd visualize and narrate a fight sequence in slow motion first, then actually do it. Except this movie doesn't narrate it or slow it down, so you the first time, I got very confused about what just happened. The movie doesn't really do anything to tell you "this is in his imagination," which is a little annoying.

The end of the movie, when Wu gets his answers is kind of interesting, because the movie presents the story from multiple perspectives, with different people remembering different things, and of course trying to make themselves look better in their version. But I feel like there's also one more "surprise!" moment than the film really needs. I guess you could argue the film's been hinting there's something up with that character the whole time, but it feels like a contrivance to wrap the explanation up neatly.

Still, even if it wasn't "Die Hard, but with Jackie Chan," a pretty solid movie.

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.

The Prisoner (1990)

In theory, this Jackie Chan movie is about a warden who fakes the execution of his prisoners, then promises them a new identity and freedom if they perform a simple job for him. In practice, that gets almost entirely ignored after the start of the movie, when a cop gets himself arrested for assault and thrown in prison, until the last twenty minutes. 

A lot of the film gets taken up with Sammo Hung's character, who keeps making escapes to see his son briefly, and is trying to figure out some way to get away for good. On top of that, Jackie Chan ends up in prison after a truly ludicrous sequence of events that had nothing to do with the "use convicts as mercs" thing.

As an aside, I like some of the odd professions Jackie gets in his movies, when he's not being a cop or secret agent. Like how he was a TV chef in Mister Nice Guy. In this one, he's a professional pool player who dates a fashion model. 

Jackie ends up in prison, dodging assassination attempts set up by the scumbag brother of the scumbag Jackie was convicted of killing. Really, the guy fell on his own knife like a dumbass, but try telling his brother that. 

So the movie jumps back and forth between those, and takes time to introduce the cop's roommate, a geeky guy who keeps a mouse he calls Goliath, and who dies horribly in an attempt on the cop. There's also one particular inmate who looks like an accountant, but apparently is a serious hardass. Although that's undercut when the warden threatens him and he responds, 'You're the kind of guy who farts, but ain't got the shit to back it up.' Um, OK?

I wouldn't say everything comes together at the end, but they at least remember what the movie started with, and make an attempt. Of course, the attempt comes via a wild shootout at an airport, where four men with handguns hold of dozens of soldiers with machine guns through the magic of killing someone with every single shot. But it's still an attempt.

Jackie Chan's First Strike

I am going to keep talking about Jackie Chan movies, and you're just gonna to have to live with it!

Jackie gets asked to watch a lady on a flight from Hong Kong to the Ukraine, and then take some time off. Instead, he ends up caught up in the theft and possible sale of a nuclear warhead to the Russian Mafia. Naturally, the leads to Jackie running around Australia again.

It's about as coherent as most of these movies have been, where things keep happening at a rapid enough pace the plot is holding together on centrifugal force as much as anything. Although the disappearance of Jackie's CIA contact just kind of happens. He gets knocked off a snowmobile and goes sliding down a slope, and he's just gone, poof! Jackie's briefly framed for murder, that gets cleared up by a five second cut to the police during the big final chase/fight sequence. I'm not at all clear on whether the guy who was selling the warhead got killed or not.

But, you know, you get a sequence where Jackie tries to explain he didn't kill someone to the man's bereaved family, and it turns into a fight where he's using a metal ladder to defend himself against four guys. Or he's scrambling around his hotel room dodging two Russian guys who are big enough it looks like they shaved a couple of bears. Or he falls off a helicopter landing strut into a freezing river. Which was actually shot in a freezing river. I think the ends of my fingers got sympathetic frostbite.

Or the underwater fight in the shark tank at the aquarium. That one was more funny than anything else, but it was funny.

Mr. Nice Guy

I spent part of last weekend with Alex, and in response to last week's hypothetical, he picked Russell Crowe to flush down the memory hole, same as Kelvin. Although he started to have second thoughts after I reminded him of Virtuosity.

More importantly, we watched more Jackie Chan movies! Amazon Prime doesn't have either of the first two Police Storys, so we went a different route. Jackie playing Jackie, a popular TV chef in Australia. He happens to help protect a reporter who has a videotape of a big crime boss trying to buy back his cocaine from the gang that stole it. Naturally, the buy back devolved into violence, especially since the Demons really like hand grenades. I mean, a lot. Everyone in the gang seems to be carrying at least one grenade at all times.

So Jackie's hunted by both groups, since neither of them want that tape getting out. His girlfriend just flew in to visit, and she in unprepared for all this. "This" meaning both the constant attacks by gangs of men in either suits or torn leather outfits, and the other women hanging around Jackie.

As usual, the movie is less about the story, and the various sequences and set pieces where Jackie Chan shows off. The early extended chase where he's squeezing between fence posts and trying to escape via oversized gorilla balloon in the middle of a mass biker wedding. The "fight" against Giancarlo, where Jackie's arms and legs are restrained. The fight inside the Demons' van, where he at one point pulls the emergency brake while jumping in the air to mule kick the leader through the back doors and over another car behind them.

Honestly, when a guy does that, you should just give up. Like those scenes where Batman trashes an entire gang and the last guy just puts his gun down and surrenders. Nothing good is going to happen if you keep trying to fight that guy.

Although the funniest scene was Sammo Hung (who's also the director) as a poor bike courier who gets caught up in the middle of the whole thing with the van. Alex and I were dying laughing.

Supercop

They kind of oversell Jackie Chan in this movie. He gets described as a "supercop" a half-dozen times in the first 15 minutes. He seemed a lot cooler and more capable in Armour of God. His sporadic lack of attention to detail is definitely troubling, for example.

Which I imagine is the point, make him appear underwhelming until the critical moments, when he suddenly is completely awesome. The only problem being, since this is Jackie Chan, I already know he's going to doing ridiculous stuff at some point, so I'd rather they just get to it. I demand instant gratification!

On the plus side, the boat they use to try and sneak into Hong Kong, had another, smaller boat hidden inside it, just like Jackie's car in Armour of God. I had jokingly suggested it when the border patrols caught up to them, and then they actually did it. Alex and I couldn't stop laughing about that

I did like how the plot seemed to continue to escalate. Help this drug smuggler escape prison. Start working for his brother, who is a big-time drug lord. Accompany him to a meeting of a bunch of big-time drug lords and their Malaysian general supplier. When Chaibat, the drug lord, says he's going to go discuss his actions with the Triad, I thought the story was just going to keep going higher up the halls of power. Like Black Dynamite, it would eventually lead all the way to the White House, or an equivalent seat of political power.

Michelle Yeoh plays Inspector Yang, Jackie's partner. She gets stuck as the more serious, stuffy half of the partnership for most of the time. Which can be a thankless role sometimes, being the responsible one, or the straight man. Fortunately, the folks making this are smart enough to make sure Inspector Yang gets to show off her skills, and Jackie's more than able to play the straight man for her. Let her make him look foolish when he gets cocky or lazy.

And Yeoh can keep up with him on the slick fighting moves, or the crazy stunts, which isn't for the female lead in most Jackie Chan movies I've seen. Sure, just fly off the back off a moving van into the windshield of some little roadster.

Armour of God

So after Kelvin told me that Operation Condor was actually a sequel of sorts, to this movie, I mentioned that to Alex when he came by last Friday, and he was all in on watching some more Jackie Chan.

First interesting thing you learn in this movie - other than it's apparently a recurring gag for Jackie's character to fall down really tall, ludicrously steep slopes at the beginning of the movie - is that before "Asian Hawk" was a mercenary/fortune hunter, he was part of a Partridge Family/Jackson 5 style pop group called "The Losers". And he left because he lost out on the affections of one of his fellow members to the lead singer, some complete loser named Alan.

Clearly that girl has no taste.

A guy Alex described as a, 'Count Chocula-looking motherfucker' has Laura (or Lorelei) abducted to force Jackie to bring him the remaining three pieces of the Armour of God, which this dude will then destroy, allowing their God to prosper. The other three pieces were bought by a guy rich enough to own 50 dogs and 3 leopards as his security system, which is just nuts, but hell, if you're that rich, you might as well go extravagant. He agrees to loan them out (the armor pieces, not the dogs and leopards), if Jackie brings him the other two pieces, and lets his daughter go along as a precaution. She's not nearly as competent as she pretends, but she's a lot more useful than Alan, at least.

Alex found some description of the movie online that described it as having the greatest car chase ever, and I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's pretty good. One of those things were you just have to laugh at some of the absurd shit that happens. Especially when the car opens to reveal another, smaller car inside.

The movie falls apart a bit at the end. Laura is supposed to capture Jackie, but captures Alan instead. The bad guy has the pieces of the armor, but doesn't destroy them. May, the rich guy's daughter, just kind of vanishes for most of the final act, and there's no resolution of things between her and Jackie. Or really, between Jackie and Alan, where the friendship is supposed to be strained over Laura, and they don't really seem to bury the hatchet.

I only noticed that stuff in retrospect, because in the moment, I was too busy watching Jackie Chan do crazy shit like hopping from one stalagmite to another while fighting four large ladies in stiletto heels, or rappelling down the side of a hot air balloon. Which is the sort of thing I was watching the movie for, so mission accomplished.

Operation Condor

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.

Kung Fu Yoga

You have a Chinese archaeologist trying to find a lost treasure that, a thousand years ago, was being delivered from an empire in India to encourage the Chinese dynasty to help in a war. The current princess of the royal lineage gets involved, as does the current heir to the ruler who had been waging war against them, each of them trying to claim the treasure, while the archaeologist is firmly in the "it belongs in a museum" camp.

Jackie Chan plays the archaeologist - named Jack Chan, so Jackie has hit the Tony Danza stage of only playing characters with his name, for simplicity's sake no doubt - and then the main characters from the two royal heritages are played by Indian actors (Ashmita played by Disha Patani and Randall by Sonu Sood), so it's maybe a mixture of film styles. I know zilch about Indian film, only that people satirize or reference it by having big dance sequences. Which this film does. Like, the plot is finished, let's all just dance for several minutes.

I skipped that part. Non-plot relevant dancing is not my thing. Plot relevant dancing isn't really my thing, either.

There's a lot of, not great CGI, especially CGI animals. Wolves, snakes - one guy gets bit in the face by two cobras, his face swells, but he does not die. Which seems unlikely. There's a car chase in Dubai where Jackie's in a SUV that had a lion in the back. I know we don't want Jackie Chan getting eaten by a lion, it's just really noticeable CGI.

The fight sequences are solid, especially allowing for Jackie Chan's age, he's still got some moves. Although the one where he's testing Jones' skills as a way to dissuade the pack of wolves from attacking their camp didn't make a hell of a lot of sense. Especially since it didn't work, the wolves did attack, and then they drove them off with snowballs. That whole thing was a little strange.

Rumble in the Bronx

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.

The Foreigner

I really wanted to see Jackie Chan going the Liam Neeson route, playing an old guy out to fuck up the people who hurt his family, so here we are.

The people in question are members of the IRA, but possibly as a result of this, the movie spends a lot more time on all the politicking, backstabbing, and maneuvering going on among the guys in Ireland's government who used to be IRA. Including Pierce Brosnan, as a Deputy Minister. He actually ends up as the focus of the film. The British government wants answers, and he needs answers to maintain his cushy job. But he can't be seen as a traitor to the cause. He's cheating on his wife, his wife is cheating on him, Jackie expects the names of the people responsible for the attack, and keeps blowing Brosnan's shit up.

There are long stretches of the movie, where Jackie Chan is barely in the movie at all. He's lurking somewhere in the woods near Brosnan's home, watching and waiting. It's an interesting approach, putting him in the role of this a lurking threat, while we watch Brosnan flail about trying to keep all his plates spinning. A bit like doing a Batman movie primarily from the perspective of some mob boss that knows Batman is going to come crashing down on his head sooner or later.

I'd still have preferred more scenes of Jackie Chan somberly grieving, or beating the crap out of people. Not that there aren't several of those scenes, I just wanted more. They made a big deal about Brosnan's nephew Sean being a former Ranger and tracker, who goes into the woods alone, and that didn't last very long. It makes sense; neither Chan or his character are spring chickens, and even with him keeping the jumping around to a relative minimum, he can't keep that stuff up for too long. And it is very different to watch him fighting and actually trying to end fights fast. Slamming dudes headfirst into trees, flipping people through tables. For a while there, he seemed to be using a surprise knee to the face a lot, to great effect. I really enjoyed those parts of the movie. The rest of it was fine, but not what I was there for.

Railroad Tigers

Jackie Chan stars in this movie about a small group of train station workers in Japanese-occupied China. The workers have been pulling off small heists of equipment from Japanese Army supply trains for some time, but all the young men in the group keep asking Ma Yuan (Chan) when they're going to do something big. This is a refrain uttered more than once, not just by the others in the group, but by other people around town, since apparently all the locals know what they're up to.

A failed attack on a bridge by the Eighth Route Army brings the group into contact with a wounded soldier. Through him they learn the bridge needs to be destroyed in four days, but their attempt to get him safely back to his unit is cut short. Since they don't know how to contact the Eighth Route Army, they'll have to destroy the bridge themselves.

The film is not played entirely seriously. Most of the Tigers can't remember how to draw the symbol of their group. Their initial attempt to acquire explosives, ends with them only getting one pack, and then having to use that to make good their escape. Sakamoto, a Captain of the Japanese Military police, gets drugged at one point, and spends the next few scenes after that being clumsy and addled as he tries to shake off the effects. A Japanese soldier tries to commit seppuku, but fails because he cuts his hand on the sword he's supposed to use. The film is upfront with this from the start, so it isn't as though it's a big surprise, but I went in unsure whether it would be a serious film or not. And when it does need to get serious to convey how dire a situation has become, it's able to do so.

The amount of CGI increases at the end, when crazy things start happening involving trains and tanks. It gets distracting at times, but overall the final battle is entertaining. There's a back-and-forth to it, as the sides trade the advantage between them on several fronts at once. Plus there's some unconventional uses of military hardware in there.

Chan plays Ma Yuan as mostly quiet, keeping a lot of pain locked inside. He's trying to fight the Japanese, but without getting any of these people helping him killed. He's lost a lot, and doesn't want to lose more people. Whenever the Japanese are around, especially Sakamoto, he adopts this slightly hunched over posture, plasters this big vacant grin on his face, and nods a lot. Playing dumb, basically. Sakamoto already regards all the locals as hicks that he can easily outsmart and anticipate, and so it plays to his expectations and uses it against them.

Skiptrace (2016)

My movie reviews are starting to get backlogged. I watched Skiptrace on Presidents' Day. Jackie Chan is a cop trying to bring down a kingpin who killed his partner. Johnny Knoxville is fast talking card shark who just so happens to have witnessed a murder committed by the man Chan believes is said kingpin. Unfortunately, Knoxville is also in deep with a Russian mobster (who believes Knoxville impregnated his daughter), and Chan had to venture to Russia to retrieve him. Then they have to make it back to China. 

A lot like Midnight Run, or Bulletproof, or Planes, Trains and Automobiles (for the travel hijinks, as I don't recall a lot of martial arts action by Steve Martin), or take your pick. Lots of complications as they try to cross a considerable amount of ground in a relatively short time, and neither likes the other, and one is constantly trying to escape or sabotage the trip. They find some common ground, the cad does the honorable thing, the upright guy learns to enjoy himself, days are saved, criminals defeated.

It definitely has its moments. Chan is showing his age, the stunts aren't as fluid, you can tell they're using more editing to try and cover for it, but that's fine. Dude's like 65 and still 15 times more agile than I'll ever be. He and Knoxville play off each other. One guy never shuts up, is constantly putting his foot in his mouth, but he's clever enough to to get the drop on someone if their guard is down. The comedy is mostly physical, no real surprise there. Either Chan doing his improvised offense bit during the fight scenes, or Knoxville getting hurt in said fight scenes, that kind of thing. There's one gag involving a Russian nesting doll that got a good laugh out of me. Knoxville's character is enough of a loudmouth jerk that it's fun to watch all the moments he thinks he has the upper hand fall apart, but not so terrible you necessarily want him badly hurt.

Both the Chinese gang and the Russian mob that's after Knoxville have women as their primary asskickers, so those two square off during the big final fight and are swinging away at each other with giant wrenches and stuff, that was pretty cool. Could have been longer. There's a couple of romantic subplots that are underdeveloped, just not given enough screen time to sell them. There's some gorgeous scenery in the film.

But in some ways the film felt long, even though it's less than 2 hours. The whole story is basically the two of them heading back towards Macau, and somehow there's just not quite enough momentum to carry it all the way there. Maybe the plot is too cliched, so you really need something special to make it work, and that's not quite there consistently.