SHANGHAI NOON
Touchstone
Starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Lucy Liu, Roger Yuan, Walton
Goggins, Xander Berkeley, Jason Connery
Music by Randy Edelman
Photographed by Dan Mindel
Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Directed by Tom Dey
For too long, Hollywood has shortchanged
Jackie Chan, the legendary Hong Kong martial-arts actor/producer/director
with the grace of Gene Kelly and the comic dash and directorial
ingenuity of Buster Keaton. Salon.com's Charles Taylor put it best when he said, "Hollywood
needs to stop treating Chan as if he were one of those fondue
sets given as wedding gifts in the '70s: a foreign novelty shoved
in a closet due to absolute cluelessness about what to do with
it." Compared to his taut and exhilarating Hong Kong efforts,
Chan's previous bids for stardom in Hollywood are all slack, half-assed
pictures, from 1980's The Big Brawl to the 1998 box-office
smash Rush Hour, in which a rather glum Chan was upstaged
by his manic co-star Chris Tucker and stuck with both less-than-spectacular
action sequences (Hong Kong filmmakers like Chan shoot action
with much more clarity and imagination than their Hollywood counterparts)
and tired, demeaning Asian foreigner shtick.
In the new Shanghai Noon, Chan
is once again cast as a foreigner, a second-tier Chinese Imperial
Guard named Chon Wang who journeys to the Wild West to rescue
his crush, the Emperor's beautiful daughter, Princess Pei Pei
(Lucy Liu), from kidnappers who want the Emperor's gold. But this
kung-fu western is a surprise; it's the best of Chan's Hollywood
movies and as close as America has gotten to capturing the comic
anarchy and anything-goes charm of his Hong Kong films (maybe
the fact that Chan is Shanghai Noon's executive producer
has something to do with it).
Shanghai Noon
is a much more satisfying vehicle than the shoddy, racist Rush
Hour mainly because, unlike that previous film, it allows
Chan to cut loose and show more of a personality. As Hollywood
directors often do with Asian male leads, the makers of Rush
Hour made the dual mistake of casting Chan as the straight
man and as a robotic, humorless martial-arts master. They seemed
to forget that humor and warmth are what make Chan so distinctive
as an action star. In Shanghai Noon, Chan is his classic
funny self again — the action hero with a goofy side. Chan's
two most entertaining moments in this new movie are actually not
in the fight scenes. (Although these fights are astounding, with
Chon making weapons out of every object he can get his swift hands
on, from a bar stool to a horseshoe — kind of like a kung-fu
MacGyver — they move a bit slower than the confrontations
in his Hong Kong days. At 46 years old and with that hole in his
skull and countless other past injuries from stunts, Chan isn't
the daredevil he used to be.) Chan's most winning bits are found
in non-action scenes: the hilarious moment where Chon befriends
a Sioux Indian tribe and they introduce him to weed, and a later
one where Chon bonds with his newfound cowboy buddy (Owen Wilson)
over drinking games (this scene received the longest laughs from
the promo screening audience).
As Chan's sidekick, Wilson is a much
more generous performer than Chris Tucker and doesn't suck all
the air from the room, resulting in a more balanced buddy-movie
pairing than in Rush Hour. Wilson plays Roy O'Bannon, a
third-rate thief who reluctantly tags along with Chon and teaches
the stranger-in-a-strange-land tips on how to survive in the West,
including a few handy tricks with his pistol — even though
he makes Deputy Barney Fife look like a sharpshooter. The Rushmore screenwriter
and star of last fall's indie thriller The Minus Man is
a master at underplaying. There's a wonderful moment where Wilson's
bumbling outlaw, who took up robbery to woo women, dreams he's
getting the massage of his life in a brothel. The punchline of
that scene (which I won't spoil) shows how skilled first-time
director Tom Dey is with comic timing.
Dey (best known for directing commercials
for the Showtime cable channel) also knows how to shoot action,
clearly showing who's fighting who and who's doing what in those
complicated, fast-moving martial-arts showdowns that always befuddle
Hollywood directors like Rush Hour's Brett Ratner. Dey
stages several clever sequences — including one atop a speeding
train and another involving a mammoth cathedral bell — that
recall the grandiose set pieces of Chan's Police Story
series. Dey makes a fine debut as a feature director, though it's
not a flawless one. The film suggests a love triangle between
Chon, his Sioux wife (Native American model Brandon Merrill) and
Pei Pei, but Dey never develops it. It would have been nice to
see something reminiscent of the amusing triangles that used to
get Chan's Police Story supercop character in trouble with
his long-suffering girlfriend Maggie Cheung.
Asian American moviegoers who didn't
enjoy Rush Hour because of its stereotypes will feel vindicated
by Shanghai Noon, which gives Chan a full-bodied character
to play and doesn't shy away from showing the anti-Chinese hatred
of the Old West. In a scene that should have been in Rush Hour,
Chon lets Roy know how he feels about his racist remarks. Shanghai
Noon feels like an act of justice: for being a Hollywood vehicle
worthy of Chan's talents, and also, for being the film Chan's
idol, Bruce Lee, should have made, but didn't because of racism.
Lee wanted to make a project about a Chinese man in the Old West
as his breakthrough vehicle in the States, but then he watched
helplessly as the producers rejected him in favor of Caucasian
David Carradine and turned the project into the preposterous,
overrated '70s TV series Kung Fu. Times have changed, and
American filmmakers and audiences are more willing (although with
still some reluctance) to accept an Asian as a lead. In Shanghai
Noon, it's clear who's running the show.
© 2000 Jim Aquino