Get your own Free Home Page
Sometimes formula is a good thing. Especially if it’s amenable to a little experimentation – tinkering with the variables. After Jackie Chan teamed up with Chris Tucker for the biggest success either of them has had, 1998’s Rush Hour (nearly $200 million box-office worldwide on a $35 million budget), the only question was, which would come first, a subspecies or a sequel? Tucker is reportedly holding out for $20 mil. to do Rush Hour 2, so that’s a no-brainer. All that was left was the matter of how the profitable equation – dropping Chan’s ingenuous Oriental athleticism into a devoutly American setting, putting him on a mission, and pairing him with a lovable Yankee loser played by an actor with some rep but not a steep price -- could be tweaked just enough to make it seem different without making it unrecognizable.
There were several possibilities: Buddhist monk Jackie joins one-eyed stock-car driver Skeet Ulrich as crew chief of the first NASCAR entry sponsored by the Dalai Lama, which is in danger of sabotage by Pat Buchanan flunkies who want to scuttle NAFTA; take-out delivery boy Jackie joins alcoholic astronaut Benecio Del Toro on a shuttle mission to solve world hunger by creating a lo mein noodle that self-replicates in zero-G, which is in danger of sabotage by a stowaway cyborg Ronald McDonald; Hunan rapcore guitarist Jackie joins kleptomaniac songwriter Ryan Phillipe to play an anthem of world peace at a U.N. conference on world disarmament, which is in danger of sabotage by a rich Welsh slingshot manufacturer, etc. But what finally won out was something that was not only an obvious choice – the Western – but is an improvement on the original.
Jackie plays Chon Wang, a screw-up guard at the Forbidden City in 1881 China who’s a last-minute addition to a Nevada-bound trio of royal badasses dispatched to rescue a kidnapped princess (Lucy Liu). Chance quickly throws him in with chivalrous aspiring trainrobber Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson), who doesn’t quite have his own act together yet but shows a lot of promise, and who seems oddly more Zen-friendly than Chon. Hemispheres and personalities collide in a fashion that wouldn’t be rivaled until Forrest Gump played ping pong in Beijing 100 years later.
Simply put, this is some real industrial-strength wack; I hadn’t laughed myself both sore and hoarse in a long time. As Chan gets older – he’s 46 now – and doesn’t heal quite as quickly from the mishaps shown in the end-title outtakes that always follow his films, he is wisely playing up the comedic quotient of his still-impressive physical talents over the death-defying aspects. Despite the presence of a first-time director (Tom Dey, whose next projects are Bad Boys 2 and the Chris Tucker spy spoof Double-0-Soul) and screenwriters who wrote that awful last Lethal Weapon installment, the odds get beat and it all comes together very well. Though slowing a little, Chan is still the world’s most impressive human special-effect, and puts on neat displays of tree fu, rope fu, hatchet fu, hair fu, horseshoe fu, bell fu, antler fu, and even some bladder fu (which isn’t anywhere nearly as tasteless as it sounds). And usually laconic Wilson, who since The Minus Man is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors, is all over the map this time as a loquacious, engaging character whose wry, good-natured ramblings make this what I hope will be his breakout role.
Throw in a whole passel of well-cast, entertaining villains, including a ruthless Chinese slaver (Roger Yuan, from LW4 and Red Corner, an overly gonzo Texas bandit (little-known Walter Goggins, whose face you won’t likely forget after this), and an unscrupulous lawman (Air Force One’s Xander Berkeley) whose name is an homage to perennial spaghetti-badguy Lee Van Cleef, and give them a script that plays to everybody’s strengths while using nearly all the traditional Western set-piece locations (a train, a brothel, an Indian village, a saloon, a church, a railroad camp, et al), and you get a genuine treat. Moreover, thanks to the trailer’s use of a scene that turns out to have been an outtake, the twist on a Butch-and-Sundance ending is even a decent surprise.
Best of all, because there’s a pretty good joke about John Wayne, I can tell my dad to go see this and be reasonably assured he’ll have a good enough time to forget about my making him sit through Life Is Beautiful. A-
Get your own Free Home Page