This is a lighthearted kids/family action movie starring Jackie Chan. It lacks depth and rushes, but is not very boring either. I give it a Bang Average rating.
The highlight of the movie is probably the extended action scene towards the end which shows Jackie Chan in his element — funny stuff.
The dubbing is pretty bad in this movie — a classic Golden Harvest production — and the special effects are a bit dated — typical of 90s era action movies — but at least it’s otherwise relatively well made, and able to sustain attention reasonably well, even in its slower dialogue scenes, although they do sometimes warrant a bit of fast-forwarding.
This movie is a bit silly in places, but is quite creative and slightly funny while being dressed in a serious tone.
I’m going to rate this movie Bang Average since it has less uncomfortable bits than many other movies rated the same — it’s more consistently pleasant — but also lacks the heavy adrenaline moments since it’s so lighthearted even during its fast action scenes.
One of the lead females — an undercover CIA agent working as a reporter — played by Michelle Ferre — makes a nice addition to this Jackie Chan classic.
This movie gets off to a powerful start, albeit slightly juvenile. Jackie Chan is acting constantly drunk and Jet Li is constantly grinning. Fortunately, Jet Li’s grinning character goes away and doesn’t come back till near the end, and we see a similar but more serious character played by Jet Li in the mean time.
The Forbidden Kingdom is a mildly powerful story, put together quite well.
By half an hour in, it looks set for an Above Average rating. By 1 hour in, that seems generous, but by the end, it seems accurate again.
There are some nice action scenes in this movie — not outstanding, but pretty good still. The fight scene between Jackie Chan and Jet Li is quite memorable, and the battle scene towards the end is pretty good.
There is a very funny scene just before the turn of the hour though — albeit very short — as Jackie Chan tries to make rain, and thinks he succeeds, until he sees what Jet Li is doing over his head.
The lead character — a nervous teenage boy, played by Michael Angarano when he was aged 19 and a half — looks a bit like Christopher Lambert crossed with Colin Farrell, with an extra pointy beak.
It’s quite rare that a movie peaks towards the end and has a very long, strong back end, leading to a great final moment, but this movie is a prime example of exactly that. Half way through I was thinking the initial Above Average prediction is too generous, but in the end I think it’s undershooting if anything.
Some edits of this movie kick off with Islamic Terrorism propaganda — how convenient for a 2001 movie!
You’ll be pleased to know there is an English dubbed version of this movie out there, although the subtitled version is very common too.
The entertainment is mild but consistent here. The plot is mildly intriguing, the action is mildly exciting, and the humour is mildly funny too.
Having said that, it’s all a bit of a lighthearted slapstick. It doesn’t encourage much emotional investment. I rate it Below Average.
The Medallion 2003 is another lighthearted slapstick action movie from Jackie Chan. This one has a mildly curious plot twist in the middle, when Jackie Chan comes back from the dead. It benefits from comedian Lee Evans, and Claire Forlani (from Meet Joe Black), as Jackie Chan’s partners in policework. There’s a bit of sci-fi fantasy here with this one. I rate it Bang Average so far as action hero movies go, because the characters aren’t deep and the action is so lighthearted. On the plus side, it’s mildly entertaining throughout. A young Scott Adkins plays one of the baddies’ goons in a few fight scenes here.
Not just another early Jackie Chan slapstick movie! This one is genuinely well conceived — compared to the usual cheap early slapsticks at least — with real plot, good ideas and good screenplay. The usual genre, but handsomely upgraded. By 15 minutes in, it already looks like a winner, likely to score Above Average at least. The characters have real depth and backstory here — even Jackie himself. And the humour is well played too — not over done, but genuinely funny occasionally.
Cameos from Richard Branson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sammo Hung and John Cleese were a nice touch.
In the end I’m going to rate this movie Above Average for the action hero genre although if you’re looking for a silly slapstick adventure you can’t do much better!
Steve Coogan makes a good lead character, and Jackie Chan is of course a great sidekick. The lead female, a French artist played by Cécile de France was pretty good at her role too.
The first 1 hour was pretty much smooth highly entertaining action-comedy starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in an unusual partnership that neither wanted initially but turned out to be good for everyone except the bad guys.
The last half hour is a bit more tense, but is still alright. On the strength of the majority of the movie which is highly entertaining, I’m going to give this a Decent rating which is close to the limit of what a slapstick comedy can score.
It’s slightly dated, but not by much. The sound effects can get irritating, but it’s tolerable.
If you loved this movie, you’re in luck since there are a couple sequels although they’re not quite as good as the original.
Rush Hour 2 (2001) picks up from where the first movie left off, with Jackie and Chris on holiday together, singing Beach Boys songs in a car in China when they get called to an urgent case. The sound effects early on are even more irritating than they were in the back end of the last movie. The sense of mystery is also gone, so the plot and even the action seem a bit hollow in places compared to last time round. As a result, I rate this one a step down from the original. We can call it Above Average. Roselyn Sanchez makes a nice addition to this movie, as one of the lead females – an undercover secret service agent. Whoever got her involved has great taste. Zhang Ziyi plays the other lead female – one of the main baddies. She does quite well too. John Lone plays the main bad guy, not very convincingly, but it suffices.
Rush Hour 3 (2007) is no less muddled but still contains some strengths including some originality — albeit less — and some remnants of what we loved from the previous Rush Hour movies. I rate this movie Bang Average. It basically replicates the same formula as the last one, but with a bit less of the goodness and a bit more of the annoying stuff — it’s just a slightly weaker version of the same thing really, which is roughly what the last one was from the original before it although the original had far more conceptual originality of course.
First impressions show potential, but there’s some terrible acting and terrible music — it’s like one big pop/trash music parade. Hopefully it’ll get better when the plot thickens.
By the half way mark, it’s clear this movie is put together to instil a particular kind of insecure discombobulated dysfunctional reckless-yet-sheepish emo attitude upon a mostly juvenile audience. The characters are unconvincing as martial artists, and they’re below average as actors in general. The music is of terribly taste. The script is half intriguing though. It oozes a cheap TV drama feel. Aside from a short appearance in the first 10 minutes, we don’t see Jackie Chan again until the second half of the movie, from around 50 minutes in, at which point the movie takes a turn for the better. Jackie Chan is an extremely old man here — only semi recognisable. Before the first hour is out, Ralph Macchio also appears. Talk about a wasted first half of the movie, and an unexpected significant uplift for the last half hour.
I’m going to rate this movie Below Average, although by half an hour in it was almost certain to be set for an even lower rating than that. Everyone needs sacking except Jackie and Macchio — the other actors and the whole crew behind the scenes need replacing. This movie represents a cool concept, poorly executed.
The star of the movie is Ben Wang, playing Li ‘Stuffed Crust’ Fong. As you can tell, it’s a less serious movie than Ralph Macchio’s original Karate Kid trilogy, or the one Jackie Chan made with Jaden Smith. It’s almost a parody like the recent series Ralph Macchio was involved in. Ben Wang’s character doesn’t come across as an action hero we can get behind — he comes across as an apologetic bed wetter. He’s not a leader, he’s a follower — he’s the complete wrong end of the spectrum for this kind of role. His demeanour is all wrong, but that’s probably the intention of the producers. He’s clearly not a serious martial artist in real life — a stuntman is probably doing all his acrobatic moves. Having said that, he’s got far better structure than Ralph Macchio who literally couldn’t be any worse thus has clearly never really done any karate in his life even though he made his name off it many decades ago.
Semi-reasonable semi-weak tournament scenes at the end. Semi-funny parody-style banter at the very end as we meet another old character from Cobra Kai in William Zabka.
There are some very entertaining parts to this mild slapstick style action comedy, especially early on. From the fast action rollerblading escape scene at the beginning, to the funny art heist scenes thereafter. But this movie is kind of let down by the hard-to-rewatch messy jungle scene that runs from 40 to 60 minutes in, and then the slow action-drama scenes towards the end. So, what was very promising to begin with, ends up being rated Bang Average.
This movie gets off to a strong start, with consecutive scenes of high quality humour, mixed with some respectable action and intrigue.
Although the pace calms down before long, the higher quality than usual of Jackie Chan movie continues to shine through for a good hour — especially with the addition of Jennifer Love-Hewitt, who was still in her prime, at the age of 23 when shooting this movie, shortly before rapidly deteriorating (or being replaced by a lookalike).
But this movie is terribly let down by the last half hour, which is little more than a chaotic mess of a nasty laboratory scene. As such I rate this movie Bang Average, even though it showed great potential in the first half — not dissimilar from Jackie Chan’s movie 10 years later, called Chinese Zodiac (aka CZ12) which showed great potential early on but went terribly down hill as the movie progressed.
True story: in the making of The Tuxedo, Jackie Chan made JLH laugh so hard she peed herself on set (according to her own confession on a Graham Norton show).
Marks down for promoting contagion theory from the outset, and pharmaceutical remedies to general aches & pains in the first half hour.
The recurring tranny theme doesn’t help either. Glorifying the genetic engineering of humans isn’t a good look either.
Add to this how much boring action-drama there is — although there are also many good bits, the second half is pretty much all skippable — so I rate this movie So-So for an action hero movie. Certainly below par for a modern Jackie Chan movie, but not by much.
Vanguard tells the story of a well resourced private security company specialising in VIP protection, headed up by Jackie Chan, on a mission to protect a VIP and his daughter from some equally well resourced & determined criminals.
Although not always concise, this movie does contain some good action, good actors and a good concept — and has a good pace in patches. Unfortunately though, it is watered down with too much boring filler dialog between the good bits.
By the end of the first half, and by the very end, this movie consistently warrants a score of Above Average.
Jackie took a step down in this movie — he had a lot less screen time than usual, and gave lots of time to the young guns in his crew — they were all pretty good too, but none of them strikingly memorable.
This movie is a refreshing but simple concept, at least early on. And there’s some nice interactions between Jackie Chan and John Cena throughout.
What lets this movie down though, and results in a Bang Average rating, is the last half hour which has several scenes that are too longwinded and monotonous. So even though the rest of the movie is pretty well made, and John & Jackie had good banter, Bang Average seems like a fair rating in the end, especially considering the very simple storyline and minimal key cast members.
Like an old slow-play action thriller that you only watched because there were limited options on the TV; this movie is mostly a boring drama by today’s standards, until about half way through, at which point the plot takes an interesting turn, or should I say, starts to move, because it was never going anywhere beforehand.
The Big Brawl was Jackie Chan‘s American debut – at this time he had minimal control over the script and even the fight choreography, but it’s still full of the classic gymnastic comedy combat that Jackie is now famous for, with a touch of Bruceploitation style fight choreography at times.
Jackie gives a charismatic performance to this otherwise dull-come-soso movie, making it watchable, and even quite entertaining at times.
Makoto ‘Mako’ Iwamatsu (from Sidekicks, 1992) also gives a strong performance in his supporting role as Jackie’s uncle and Kung Fu teacher.
This movie is mildly entertaining. One of Jackie Chan’s early English movies. If you’re a fan of Jackie Chan and are bored, this movie can be mildly enjoyable to watch. Also featuring Bill ‘Superfoot’ Wallace as the main antagonist who fights – they meet near the end, like a final boss scene. The plot is thin and the acting is nothing special, but Jackie brings his usual energy this film. As it’s one of his earlier movies, he’s still trying to establish himself so he’s very acrobatic in his fight scenes but they’re not so cleverly arranged as in the more recent higher-budget movies where he has more control and confidence, and for the same reason he’s a bit more serious, there’s less of the cheesy humour that he becomes known for in his later movies. There’s also more blasphemy (from Jackie) and more nudity (moderate female nudity) than you might expect, as well as depictions of drugs (packing, not consuming) and an ugly murder scene (with a utensil lodged in an eye). But there’s nothing terribly unsuitable for guided family viewing except for the most young or conservative of households who might prefer something more classy, less explicit or less ‘vice’ themed.
What’s incredible is Jackie was well aware of all the flaws I’ve mentioned, and had disagreements with the director over them. They reached a compromise where the director’s cut went out to American audiences but Jackie’s own personal edit was released in Cantonese for Hong Kong audiences. Jackie’s version had a deeper plot, more attention to detail in fight scenes (often completely re-shot for the Cantonese version), faster action scenes, less nudity and less blasphemy (Cantonese dubbing often completely changed the dialogue, not only removing curse words). But there’s no dubs or subs needed for the American version, as The Protector is an English-first movie with a 50-50 mix of American and Asian actors.
This was Jackie Chan’s 2nd attempt to breakthrough to the American market and was a mild success (both in Hong Kong and America) and an improvement on his first attempt (The Big Brawl, 1980) even while being so unhappy with the American director James Glickenhaus who, in an interview in 1985, assured the world that the American audience will never sit still for Jackie’s style of action!
Jackie Chan makes a decent attempt at remaking the classic movie from 1984, with a twist. This time it’s set in China and it’s all about Chinese Kung Fu, not Japanese Karate.
Jackie Chan plays the teacher (Mr Han, the maintenance man) quite well, and Jaden Smith does a decent job as the student (Dre Parker, the new kid in town, being bullied). Supporting cast range from average to pretty good. Zhenwei Wang does a good job as Cheng, the leader of the bullies in this movie, and Yu Rongguang does a good job as Master Li, the aggressive teacher of the bullies.
The movie starts out like a boring drama, slowly setting the scene as Jaden’s character and his mum move to China. It starts to become interesting after 10 minutes, as Jaden’s character meets the maintenance man (played by Jackie Chan). But it doesn’t become really good until 40 minutes in, when Jackie sees Jaden getting beaten up and then reveals himself as Kung Fu expert. From here it’s mostly good action and entertainment, with the exception of an excessively long sobbing drama scene around 90 minutes in. The last 20 minutes are pretty good, as the tournament begins, closely following the format of the original classic but with a few stylistic twists. The very ending is very good, in-keeping with the original.
Overall, not a bad movie to watch if you’re bored and haven’t seen this before or at least in the last few years. I give it a 7/10 because it’s a bit hard to relate to the pre-pubescent lead actor. This movie is nothing to shout about, but it’s not bad entertainment value either. It’s hard to go wrong with Jackie Chan. If not for the boring start and the lengthy sobbing scene it might deserve a 7.5 to match the original classic.
High quality acting with an action-packed plot backed by decent budget, this Jackie Chan movie is one of his more comedic and adventurous ones – great for watching with people who like comedy and adventure movies. Good level of martial arts involved but not so much that only martial arts fans would like it. Shanghai Noon also has a high quality sequel – Shanghai Knights – with its own creative storyline – well worth watching in succession. Don’t be put off by the co-star’s Boris-Johnson-esque wig, he’s actually a likeable character that wins you over by the end.
Action wise, it’s a busy movie that keeps you on your toes. It’s scraps & stunts. Surprisingly, there’s scarcely a dull moment in it. The plot is a story and a half, which stays busy and fun, if a bit muddled. Cast wise, it has a strong lead with decent support, but would still benefit from an additional star being given significant screen time.
| ACTION BUSYNESS | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| MOOD SETTING | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| SCRIPT COHESION | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| PLOT DENSITY | ⭐⭐⭐ |
This movie is thoroughly entertaining – it’s one of Jackie’s slightly more gritty performances but still provides great action for his usual fanbase just with the omission of the usual comedic edge. The only letdown is the socio-political message being pushed by this movie. That aspect of it really stinks. Still, Jackie holds it down very well so it doesn’t upset the movie too much. We’re treated to a very strong performance by Pierce Brosnan too, as an Irish politician and former IRA leader who has to defend his farm-come-castle from an angry elderly Chinaman who happens to be ex special forces – a role played flawlessly by Jackie Chan with the help of a great all-round movie production.
It’s slightly minimal on plot aside from the core concept – hardly as many twists & turns as The Matrix – but that’s fine. It focuses on one theme – a slowly developing scenario – and does it exceedingly well.
We’ve previously seen how fantastic a movie can be when a top martial arts movie star teams up with a former James Bond, as happened when Van Damme worked with Roger Moore on The Quest (1996). The Foreigner is no exception to this trend – Jackie Chan makes a great team with Pierce Brosnan here, only this time they are adversaries.
There’s a good amount of combat but this movie, but the entertainment value comes more from the story. Action wise, it’s not nearly so complex or grandiose as James Bond, but it’s got a good amount of simple action throughout. Script wise, it’s a very simple story, well executed. Cast wise, there are several strong characters in this movie.
Rumour says Jackie had been craving a more serious romantic or dramatic role (minus the comedy) for a long time. Now that he’s finally had one, we can see why. He’s an outstanding actor. It’s a very moving movie. This follows the pattern of his first few American movies, where he wasn’t permitted to choreograph his fight scenes in the ways he knew would work best, because the directors couldn’t think beyond trying to imitate the old established style of screen combat, but when Jackie eventually gained enough authority to do his own thing, the world loved it, and I hope those early directors held their heads in shame.
Action Hero Movies