There are two new Jackie Chan movies out today, but only one is dumb and fun
Film Reviews Movie Review
There’s no reason why a movie that features Jackie Chan, lion attacks, and machete-wielding henchmen on Jet Skis should be as boring as Vanguard. Yet this charmless offering from Stanley Tong (who once upon a time directed Police Story 3: Supercop and Rumble In The Bronx) manages to bring together the least winning qualities of recent Chinese multiplex schlock. If the films for which Tong is remembered were cartoonish, this one is half literal cartoon: a slurry of luxury vehicles flying and crashing through globetrotting background footage, with ugly textures and poor physics that place the proceedings well into the automotive equivalent of the uncanny valley.
Whether it is actually a Jackie Chan film is questionable. The aging Hong Kong star definitely appears in many scenes as Tang, the head of Vanguard, an elite London-based security firm. And he is in fact visible in one of the chase sequences (this one involving an amphibious Jeep and the aforementioned henchmen on Jet Skis), throwing less-than-convincing, love-tap punches at various thugs. But for the most part, he’s here to bless the visual noise with his uncharacteristically sedate presence and to read out loud the yadda-yadda plot, which concerns a shady ex-arms-dealer client whose daughter (Xu Ruohan) must be protected from nefarious groups called the Arctic Wolves and the Brotherhood of Vengeance and a bad guy named Borto (stuntman Brahmin Chab). The rest is carried by negligible personalities with boy band hair, played by the likes of Yang Yang and Ai Lun.
Vanguard is technically action-filled, in that it is full of what is loosely termed “action”: explosions, car crashes, set pieces that involve the shopping districts of various cities, and even a shootout with a hoverboard. But the move from practical stuns to a discount VFX simulacrum (no real cars appear to have been wrecked in any of these chase scenes) has not flattered Tong’s amateurish direction. It doesn’t help that the movie plays like a cheap copy of the last Tong-Chan joint, Kung Fu Yoga, right down to the CGI animal antics and eventual relocation to Dubai. That movie already felt like a knock-off of a dozen different films (including Tong’s earlier Chan vehicle The Myth, to which it was a quasi-reboot).
This kind of hyper-derivative multiple personality syndrome is as common among pre-sales-based international products as franchise-itis is among Hollywood blockbusters. But it does sometimes lead to wackadoodle results, as in the case of Oleg Stepchenko’s Russian-Chinese coproduction Iron Mask, in which Chan also puts in an appearance alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, the late Rutger Hauer. Given that both films are being released on the same day, Stepchenko’s bizarre 18th-century-set fantasy is the superior choice, in part because Charles Dance-narrated gobbledygook about wizards, tea, and “the great dragon’s eyelashes” is obviously preferable to inanities about weapons of mass destruction.
Although it isn’t actually a comedy, Iron Mask qualifies, in substantial stretches, as one of the funniest films of the year. The first 15 minutes abound in goofy delights: bad dubbing, convoluted expository narration, clunky English-language dialogue. The last is also plentiful in Vanguard, but it doesn’t come close to the dazzling heights of “This shall be my final letter to you, as I only have a single pigeon left” and “I’m not just a teacher! I’m a bachelor of geography and cartography!” This is what separates delectable garbage from mere junk. It’s only in the former category that one can find Schwarzenegger, wearing a mustache, wig, and tricorn hat in the role of an English dungeon keeper, yelling, “Where would you go? It’s the Towaaah!”
Of course, to a certain kind of trash fanatic, a film with multiple misleading alternate titles is inherently irresistible; this one has already been released in various territories as The Dragon Seal, The Mystery Of The Dragon Seal, and Viy 2: Journey To China. In theory, it’s a sequel to Stepchenko’s Russian blockbuster Viy, which bore only a loose relationship to the classic Nikolai Gogol story of the same title. (To approximate the dissonance between literary source material and end product, just imagine that Iron Mask is called The Cask Of Amontillado 2: Mission To Moscow.) The previous film’s protagonist, the English mapmaker and inventor Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng), returns, though he’s mostly extraneous to an incomprehensible plot that Stepchenko tries to wrangle in a broad style inspired by professional Johnny Depp minders like Gore Verbinski and Tim Burton.
Said plot involves Peter The Great (Yuri Kolokolnikov), who is being kept prisoner in a tower in London (which isn’t the Tower Of London) alongside a Chinese martial arts master (Chan, with long white hair and a beard) while an impostor sits on his throne. This does eventually lead to a showdown between Chan’s jailed sage and Schwarzenegger’s antiques-collecting warden, and though it’s a shame that we’ve had to wait until both action stars were well into the AARP demographic for an Arnie versus Jackie slugfest, Stepchenko has the sense to build the scene around their comic timing. In fact, at least two-thirds of Iron Mask is funny on purpose. The rest, however, is eventually dragged down by compounding inertia.
Winged imps, gender-bending disguises, and a second royal impostor storyline are thrown into the mix, until the film decides that what it really wants to be is a bog-standard Chinese fantasy film, shunting off its endearingly bizarre subplots to a potential sequel. The spectacle of witches and dragons is not one of Iron Mask’s strengths; the film is simply better as a messy co-production smorgasbord. Nonetheless, in our exhausting, dispiriting times, anything that wears out its welcome with such ludicrous pizzazz feels like a tonic.
40 Comments
I still have no idea why somebody hasn’t taken a look at the trailer to Iron Mask, see that everyone loved the notion of Arnold vs. Jackie Chan, with both actors hamming it up as much as they can, and greenlit into an actual full-length film instead of just one tiny scene.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been dropping in quality so fast he’s a step or two away from costarring in a Steven Seagal movie.
Fuck Jackie Chan, the homophobic bootlicker.
You’re telling me a 66 yo Chinese dude is homophobic?Aw hell, next you’ll be telling me an overwhelming majority of humans on earth his age are…
Jackie Chan is a TERRIBLE person, but I assume you’re going to defend him because he isn’t white.At his level of ACTUAL FACISM and 1930’s value system on everything from drugs, sexuality, and women, if he was caucasian, he’d be an irrelevant cancelled footnote. Instead, he’s a quirky beloved wonderful stunt actor guy. I can imagine only one reason why that is.
Jackie Chan to be polite has a lot of things wrong with him but when you read about his past- that he was sold to a kind of circus, that he can’t write etc, you kind of feel sorry for him.
Its not like they have his son or anything. I’m pretty sure all the fight went out after his son got busted for drugs.
Excuse me, my stuntman bad guy is also named Borto.“(no real cars appear to have been wrecked in any of these chase scenes)”Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. If anyone would like to see some real cars get trashed though, I can recommend without reservation the recently unearthed/re-released Action U.S.A., made in the late 80s by stuntmen in Texas who are all about blowing up vehicles and lighting people on fire and chucking folks out of helicopters. And it also has some delightfully blithe dialogue, although no bachelors of cartography. And you can throw indie theaters a few bucks when you watch it! https://www.brattlefilm.org/virtual-programs/action-u-s-a/
I’ve enjoyed Action U.S.A. ever since I stumbled across a videotape of it in a pawn shop many years ago. Of course it’s a great favorite of Burl’s, who, I see, also obtained his copy in a pawn shop:http://hiitsburl.blogspot.com/2014/01/burl-reviews-action-usa.html
Ha ha! Of course Burl is on this and rightfully notes the not-quite-Sidaris nature of the movie.
I think the wackiest Jackie Chan film experienced was The Spy Next Door. Not that it’s a great film or even a good one, it was just surreal seeing him fight Sportacus from LazyTown. That, and seeing Sportacus without Robbie Rotton.
Reminder: The Foreigner is great, and free on Netflix right now. Maybe this is covid talking, but it’s a really, really great action flick.
It is not the covid talking, The Foreigner owns (and it was Ignatiy’s review here that got me to check it out in the first place). Excellent no-bullshit action with a surprisingly dark and resonant plot, I think they updated the original 90s story very well.
The Foreigner is a good thriller with some really great action scenes, but it’s all at a human-sized scale. Jackie Chan plays a grieving father (who was a special operations forces soldier during the Vietnam War) seeking payback for a bomb set by an IRA splinter group that killed his daughter as collateral damage. He goes from London where he owns a Chinese restaurant to Belfast to demand the Sinn Féin politician and deputy First Minister played by Pierce Brosnan (playing against type as a slick politico, and having a rare chance to use his own Irish accent) give him the names of the men responsible. When Brosnan claims ignorance and kicks him out of his office, Chan blows up first the bathroom next to Brosnan’s office, rigs his car obviously for explosives and a note demanding the names. It all kind of goes downhill from there for Pierce’s Brosnan’s politician….
The Foreigner reminded me of the Tom Clancy and Tom Clancy-esque international thrillers from the 90s with a little bit of Jackie Chan action thrown in to spice it up. It was a kickass movie on its own, but the fact that we haven’t seen this genre in a couple of decades made it that much more enjoyable.
negligible personalities with boy band hair
Daaaaaaaaamn
Right?
Around the time Schwarzenegger showed up as an Ottoman sultan in Chan’s Around the World in Eighty Days is when I turned that picture off.
as someone who has worked in and spent some time in china, they fully believe they will win the culture war with their brilliant cinema (despite being so obsessed with marvel movies that the joking ‘don’t tell us what happens’ was tinged with actual hopefulness.) they are honestly baffled why their output to date can’t capture a wide audience.
I dunno. Wolf Warrior seems to have done more than alright. Whatever winning the “culture war” means. And on the other end, China has respected art house movies too. No reason they can’t do it.I’d say it’s going to a crime neo-noir that really cracks it—there’s a lot of that coming out of China. Nothing like an actual corrupt state to really get the creative juices flowing.
“Whatever winning the “culture war” means.”Sometimes it feels like winning would have us believe helping people AND crushing them in the name of society are the ideal. As little hope I have for America’s future, I think the individual would rather be free than live in a “harmonious” society. Since the CCP can’t use soft power it is only fearful, and that’s not a good long term look.
It helps if you’re allowed to call the state corrupt, of course.
Indeed, and they can’t unless it’s historical (and then maybe). But that’s why I think noir is flourishing, it shows the grind of the little people in a system, and it’s got nooks and crannies to hide some commentary.
i think the problem is that the average middle class chinese person has no trace of irony. china faces a lot of issues, on a lot of fronts. in some respects, its literally doomed (fresh water is a thing you need if you are a person and china… doesn’t have much) but i worked with and spent time with essentially upper middle class chinese people and they had absolutely no disagreement with their government of how they were doing stuff.
They were/are, on a personal level, good people and i like them and i keep in touch. but they were perfectly fine with taking me to a ‘muslim’ restaurant (i.e. uigher run restaurant in shanghai) and there was no acknowledgement they had a issue with that.
I personally wouldn’t distill it down to a lack of irony—what you describe feels like a pretty human trait, whatever the cultural inflections. I should say, my family’s Chinese and Taiwanese, but in the generation that left when the Nationalists lost. And then I was born somewhere else and we moved to the US, which is where I come from in thinking that the blinkers you describe feel pretty universal.Which is not to say that Chinese culture and government doesn’t exert a lot of purposeful storytelling. So continuity is one of those elements–every story is wrapped up in being a continuation or a reclamation of glory, in the way the American story is so prosperity via one’s own work. I will say though that one aspect of the Chinese middle class is that it’s very new, and the hardship and privation that every Chinese success is measured against is very new. What’s happened is recent memory, in a way that American success isn’t. That’s part of the pull of their nationalist story.
Wolf Warrior hasn’t done shit except be the Chinese Die Hard or whatever. No one in the West is watching it.
i look at a lot of that stuff and see it as somewhat pointless. say what you will about bollywood, or some of the crazy no budget stuff coming out of africa, but at least its representing artists working with what they have, representing their culture. chinese mainstream films are ‘die hard, but without any soul.’
That’s an awfully reductive reading, and honestly is starting to sound more like your opinion of the contemporary Chinese middle class more than just mainstream movies. I’m not even that high on contemporary Chinese anything, and the hey they’ll never do it, and their products are soulless strikes me as just as foolish as your friends who say they’ll definitely do it.
i don’t think it is reductive- china is currently pushing a conservative drive to have its citizens rally around the flag. they’re cracking down on hong kong, ethnic minorities. even outside of the Uighurs, anyone muslim is being targeted. they’re antagonizing anyone who has anything nice to say about taiwan. and as long as people like i know exist, they’ll find fertile ground. they delivered for those people and its easy to get their support
Well, yeah, but we started with the “culture war” and movies in particular no? I’m not endorsing it, but their policies have an appeal in China and China’s system has appeal around the world. It’s not like the US or other places don’t have similar movements or even dissimilar movements willing to compromise. You cite Die Hard, which not only has multiple derivative sequels, as an example of a cultural product with “soul”—a story about foreign terrorists and the can do individual American who with force and violence fights them off, yippee ka yay! I don’t want their culture to win the “culture war,” which I’ll say I viewed in the context of entertainment products and I’m not sure how salient government policy is then, but I try not to confuse what I like and prefer with what has appeal, because China clearly has appeal along with substantial economic influence. Things are global enough that the “west” is not the lone arbiter anymore of dominance.
china’s system absolutely has no appeal around the world. they’re throwing money around, but they’re angering every person they run into. they may take the money, but they aren’t winning hearts and minds. and if you’ve seen either their endless recreations of ‘journey to the west’ or their sad attempts to recreate western blockbusters, you can’t expect them to have the same impact that holly or bolly wood have on their populations in the cultural space. china skipped the step where they were the on paper benevolent outside power and went right to the imperious jerk stage
While not defined by it, I think it’s fair to say that soullessness is something Chinese properties struggle with. Getting an audience to emotionally connect with the work can be hard, but Hollywood has a lot of experience with that and a lot of creatives who push for it. That’s not to say that every Hollywood film is deep; there are entire megafranchises shittier than most Chinese knockoffs. But there’s definitely something working against the Chinese film industry’s ability to make the kind of blockbuster smash that just totally hooks an audience in. Censorship, too many cooks, maybe just more time for the industry to grow and develop? I don’t know. But I hope they figure it out because the whole Wuxia genre is pretty cool, and deserves better representation than The Untamed.
The Wandering Earth was fairly decent.
Haven’t seen it yet.Is it on some US streamer?
I saw it on Netflix. Not sure if it’s still there.
if the success of the marvel movies means the u.s. “won the culture war” then all that means is that china has an obligation to nuke us into dust now
Good thing the Snyderverse failed to do so so utterly — although if they targeted their nukes at ZackSnyder!’s house, it might be some kind of moral victory….
I watched some youtube philosophy videos on it, and the theory is that the stories are not perceived as legitimate because of censorship. Self-censorship can be terrible for the creative instinct. Also a lot of American cinema is anti-authoritarian or anti-government, featuring a lone protagonist fighting a system, and you can’t do that in China.
That screenshot of Schwarzenegger up there was everything I needed to get through this day. Amazing. Thank you.
Saw Viy 2 earlier this year and it’s not a good film but it is entertaining. It’s a film to watch with friends at home.