Shanghai Noon

SHANGHAI NOON (2000) **1/2

Reviewed 6/10/00

With more mugging than usual and fewer quality action sequences, the new Jackie Chan vehicle nevertheless maintains a buoyant aura of fun, in large part thanks to Owen Wilson playing Chan's sidekick. Taking place in the west, the movie simply provides a new context for Chan's old tricks, none of them improved (Chan's frequent co-star Yuen Biao performed as fight coordinator). A fight scene with throwing axes might have been funnier had it not already been performed in Project A, Part II. The climatic battle in a bell tower here, including a much shorter fall, is reminiscent of Project A's most famous clock tower scene as well as the ending fight sequence from Police Story 2, which takes place from great heights in a factory. But to expect the now 46-year old Chan to duplicate the feats of his early-30s self is hardly realistic (though physically, Chan performed far more admirably in 1998's Who Am I? than here). But now add in the perfect English-speaking comic relief sidekick as a conduit for American audiences, Chris Tucker in Rush Hour and Wilson here, and we have a palatable formula.

Wilson substitutes Tucker's manic ticks with throwaway bon mots, often knowing commentary revealing the genre conventions of the film itself. Wilson trying to plot an escape from jail with Jackie Chan: "Does the sick prisoner routine still work in China, because, I don't know, it's been done to death here!" A large number of the jokes bomb as in early Woody Allen films, but like those films, the good ones come at a sufficiently rapid pace that the film sustains hilarity. One mystery though is why the writers thought one unfunny John Wayne joke was so good that they used it twice. Shanghai Noon does leave in a number of humorous unsubtitled Chinese reactions from Chan that will pass over the heads of most Western audiences.

The story does not make a lick of sense, involving Imperial Guard Chan going off to rescue kidnapped Princess Pei Pei, played by Ally McBeal's Lucy Liu, who has taken over the mantle of (there can only be one) Asian actress of the moment from Ming-Na Wen (1994-1998, let her career R.I.P.). As terrific as Liu is in McBeal, she doesn't seem to realize she's in a comedy here. Where is Maggie Cheung when you need her! Roger Yuan's blackmailing villain is largely forgettable, but his chief henchman, a delectably devilish sheriff named Van Cleef (in obvious homage) is portrayed with a wonderful submerged glee by Xander Berkeley.

The plot goes along strictly as formula demands with gaps of logic everywhere, and this would have been acceptable since we don't go to Jackie Chan films for the plot, but writers, Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, could not leave a breezy comedy alone and just had to have aspirations toward social commentary, specifically on the racism against the Chinese in the old West. Yet one would think that if they were going to take on the subject of racism, then they would not be racist themselves, but here, Millar and Gough are just that to the Native Americans in the film. The Sioux are entirely a plot device with Indian culture turned into jokes. After Chan is bombed out on a peace pipe, one Sioux says, "That is some pretty bad shit!" The jokes are based more on the depiction of Native Americans in other movies than actual life, but they come off more as a lovable embrace of those idiotic depictions than a critiquing or satirizing of them. Basically, the Sioux are there to act as rescue team whenever the writers run out of ideas. The most egregious gesture though, which follows the sexist strain in the film, occurs at the end when Chan's nameless Indian Wife is bestowed to Owen Wilson as an accolade for their victory. Indian Wife (that is how she appears in the credits) is strikingly played by Brandon Merrill, and she goes through the film saving Chan and Wilson's asses then conveniently disappears right afterwards. Her only reward for this is Chan's ignoring her and Wilson's hitting on her as if he approached her in a bar. When the stars of Hollywood pictures are not white as with Chow Yun Fat in The Replacement Killers and Wesley Snipes in Drop Zone and they get partnered with women of different ethnicity who would expectedly be the love interest, ala Speed, they strangely do not connect. Here, Wilson gets the girl with no effort at all.