Mr. Nice Guy

The two ass-kickers who I would most want on my side if I was about to get my ass kicked in a movie are Bruce Willis and Jackie Chan (sorry, Ahnold, but "Eraser" blew like El Nino). They are a fascinating study in contrasts; although they are equally effective, the methodology is completely different. Willis (as defined, primarily, in the Die Hard films and "The Last Boy Scout") is the blue-collar, why-did-I-ever-let-myself-get-dragged-into-this?, muscular ass-kicker, carrying a gun that's not large but quite serviceable and always persevering to the very end, ready to protect his wife, the city of New York or some stripper he doesn't even know. He's a gamer, deceptively intelligent, gutting out a victory through pain and gunplay: the archetype of the modern Hollywood action hero who involves you in his struggles and makes you feel his relief when he triumphs.

Chan is an enigma in terms of the characters he plays, which are always dubbed (except in the movie presently under consideration) and are almost always (except in "Crime Story") nice guys not entirely convinced of their own competence but who have somehow managed to get mixed up in something beyond their powers of understanding…but not their powers of resolution. The methodology is an astonishing sense of space and use of environment and some good ol'-fashioned egg-roll-and-Szechuan-beef kung fu, in that order: no Coliseum showdowns with Chuck Norris for this man. He's a creature of his environment and, while not necessarily comprehending everything when standing still, is always quicker on his feet, mentally and physically, than the people he beats.

Because we're so used to people slugging it out stupidly or grabbing insanely obvious props to fight with (e.g. "U.S. Marshals," where useful lengths of pipe seemed to pop up randomly when someone was losing), this often provokes amazement and/or laughter. Chan is also a great comedian, and does not shy away from using this ability; it is a testament to his ability that his facial expressions are sufficient to convey humor in such strenuously incompetently dubbed films as "Jackie Chan's Police Force" and "City Hunter." (This film is not as funny as some of his are, however, but he still doesn't shy away from including total slapstick moments, which American action films should really have more of. Also cartoon noises! Who says Ahnold is above cartoon noises?)

The result is a uniquely thrilling moviegoing experience, the total antithesis of "Hard Rain," where more ammunition was disgorged to less artistic or practical purpose than in any other movie I have ever seen. Guns in Jackie Chan movies are basically signals for Jackie Chan to kick them away or for something funny to happen or for Jackie to get captured and taken to the boss's house or something where he can disarm people and have more fights. The reason you go is for the fights, which Chan dispatches, even at his advanced (for an Action Hero) age, with such a stunning sense of space and flair that it calls to this culturally egalitarian reviewer's mind some of the piano concertos of Mozart: simultaneous discursive dialogues with the orchestra and with the material itself, moving in two worlds at once, watching the fist coming at your face even as your feet move to flip a chair at two other attackers that people watching the movie didn't even see until they went down.

Well, the other reason you go is for the stunts, which are frankly astonishing, in that I kept thinking "I'd never do that in a million years, not even if I was sure I was capable of doing it and I was getting paid." In particular I am here referring to Chan's twenty-foot jump off a bridge onto some sort of construction apparatus and subsequent swing across a hundred-foot-wide river, but there are also some unfun-looking things with construction apparatuses at one point, including the all-time most popular cartoon violence cliché of the hero being pushed down the table of a buzzsaw where the buzzsaw is poised to cut him in two, which Chan extracts himself from admirably, and again with this awareness of the physical reality around him, inanimate as well as animate, that consistently delights.

Of coups, there are certain gaping flaws you have to accept in a Jackie Chan film to get this good stuff. Incompetent acting from everyone who doesn't have the initials J.C, for one. In particular, I am referring to goddamn Maggie Cheung [see comments below!] as Chan's girlfriend, who was in "First Strike," "Jackie Chan's Police Force," "Supercop," and a bunch of others in the same role, and whose sole talents seem to be dressing in incredibly loose garments, becoming jealous of any other woman in Jackie's life (which may have been justified in "Supercop" (I can't imagine any woman not being a little suspicious when seeing her man hanging out with Michelle Yeoh) but not here) and screaming "JACKIE!" when she gets captured. And the dialogue here is…well, let's just say I never want to hear the following lines in an action movie again:

• "There are too many innocent people down there!"
• "We have enough evidence on [evil hero] to put him away for good."
• "I don't want a loose cannon endangering this investigation."

I keep getting this incurable urge to rent a French movie (like "A Single Girl," not that I have any earthly idea why I have fixated on that movie) whenever I hear lines like that. The direction is worse than normal here, respectful of Chan's skills but full of useless uses of slo-mo at various crucial points, which doesn't sound bad except that out of the twenty times or so he uses slo-mo, it is needed about twice. The music is the worst kind of synthesized schlock, but you're not exactly going to attend this film to hear the second coming of Richard Strauss, either.

Speaking of recycled people, as we were in the middle of the last paragraph (remember then? You were much younger), most of the members of the gang called the "Demons" in this movie are the same actors who played punk-asses in "Rumble in the Bronx," including the same knife-wielding dude, and from "Tomorrow Never Dies"…Dieter has found work! Yes, our friend Dieter who was the last guy Bond offed before he went down under the sea to make out with Michelle Yeoh, pull her up to shore, and make out with her again. I don't even know his name, but he's a pretty damn good fighter and looks intimidating and I personally hope he can get killed by enough famous people that he can eventually have Howie Long's career. We can only dream.

Believability: Wellllllll…Besides the normal crimes against logic and the fact that I had no idea what the plot was for a good third of the movie, there is the odd fact that Madame Lisa Liu and I noticed at exactly the same time: the videotape of the drug deal going awry taken by the investigative reporter (the reason I didn't tell you about any of this is that you should emphatically not see this movie for its "plot"), although it is taken by one cameraman and is in transit for the entirety of the movie, shows multiple camera angles and nice editing and looks suspiciously like, uh, the version of the drug deal we as moviegoers saw.

Tension: Everyone knows who's going to win and we are never really shaken in our beliefs. The tension here is entirely endemic to the

Action: which is unparalleled, as was expounded upon at obscene length earlier.

Attractive Man Count: Madame [Lisa] Liu and Beatriz Sanchez concurred in their opinion that there was no really compelling male presence in this movie, although Jackie Chan has a "nice personality," which I still think is not as catchy as the title of the movie ended up being.

Attractive Woman Count: Like, there are a lot of women who are supposed to be attractive but aren't really that good-looking, and then there's Maggie Cheung [see comments below again!], who was totally hot in "Irma Vep" (another French movie) but who looks like a limp rag doll for most of this movie. This one woman is in her underwear for about three minutes screen time, and (only in a Jackie Chan movie) the crowd applauds when in the process of escaping she takes the robe off and exposes her half-naked self to the public eye. I don't know. I'd say about a 1 for the three of them collectively.

Overall Grade: A-. C- for content, but A+++++ for form.

Two things:

• Dieter, whose actual name in "Tomorrow Never Dies" is Mr. Stamper, is played by Götz Otto. Also that's not the dude in this movie, whose identity I cannot discern from the IMDb entry for this film, but is definitely not Götz Otto. This obviously is useful knowledge, but I didn't know how to obtain it when I was writing this review, because (I remember this) I couldn't find his name in the credits to remember for later.
• Also Maggie Cheung was not in this movie. I apologize profusely. I take back everything bad I said about Maggie Cheung in this review. I left it in only to show how ignorant I once was. I can only hope that if she is thinking about whether to leave Hong Kong to date me and this was tipping the scales towards staying home, this apology can right the balance.

I guess professionalism does have its advantages.

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