How can you not like Jackie Chan? For our entertainment, he willingly flings himself off buildings, dives head first into cars, jumps over cliffs, crashes through windows and uses furniture like deadly weapons. And he doesn’t use stunt doubles. Jackie Chan is his own stunt double. Jackie Chan is absolutely frigging nuts!
The guy is 48 years old, but he looks and moves like he’s 16. I’m in my early 30s and I pulled three muscles just watching the film. Sure, he’s probably broken nearly every bone in his body about a dozen times, but for some insane reason he keeps going out and doing it again.
And I for one am glad he does. Sure, not everything he does is gold. He’s got the odd dud under his belt, but he’s also got the odd gem in there as well. And regardless of what he does, everyone in the whole world still loves him. It’s true, I asked. They all said “We love Jackie, regardless of what he does.”
This time around, old rubber bones is a spy. But not just any old spy, he’s The Accidental Spy. He wasn’t always The Accidental Spy. He used to be just A Guy. Then he became The Sales Guy. Then he discovered he had really good intuition. So he became The Intuitive Sales Guy. But as exciting as it sounds, The Intuitive Sales Guy probably wouldn’t have made a very interesting film...
“Jackie Chan IS The Intuitive Sales Guy! Watch him get a gut feeling that the cash register is dangerously low in small change! See him have a wild hunch that a customer won’t pay the retail price! You’ll be amazed when he can’t shake the feeling that the staff percolator is out of coffee!”
Acting with Jackie, I see Ben Affleck as the evil Toy Department Manager, maybe Marisa Tomei as the checkout chick/love interest and William Shatner as the demented wino who comes into the store every day asking for a spare dollar for food.
Insert a fight and some stunts every five minutes, and The Intuitive Sales Guy would be every bit as good as The Accidental Spy. Now I’m not saying that Jackie’s film isn’t good or anything, it’s just that in-between the fighting, stunts and flippity-floppity body popping limbs akimbo action, the story just seems to confuse, bore and frustrate with inane dialogue, sudden leaps in time and a drawn out plot.
Storywise, Jackie plays a sales guy in a fitness shop. One day, using his infallible intuition, he foils a robbery and makes the news. A private investigator tells him that his father who gave him up for adoption wants to meet him. Jackie finds him dying in a military hospital and is told if he plays a little game he’ll inherit all his money. Afterwards, he’s also told by a reporter that his father was a double agent involved in a super drug deal gone wrong. Jackie follows the clues left by his Pop and uncovers what the good guys and the bad guys are both after. Along the way he falls in love, kicks some arse and saves the world. Same old same old.
Lame story, eh? Try watching it! But hey, this is Jackie Chan, forget the storyline, what you came for was the fight scenes and the stunts and maybe the girls in tight black leather outfits. The fight scenes are good, but there’s nothing so special about any one of them that you'll be raving. Jackie is his usual flexible self, sliding and flipping and twisting and turning and bending and swinging and kung-fuing his way out of trouble, but the scenes are usually too short and nowhere near as inventive as he has been in the past. Which isn’t to say that he’s not still damn impressive. It’s just that Jackie has raised the bar so high, I don’t think even he can jump it any more. Stunts are the same deal, nothing really leaping out of the screen at you and making you poop your pants.
And we all know that a good pants pooping is what is needed in cinema these days to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
None of this means that I’d be looking to pick a fight with Jackie. If I was armed with guns, knives and a surface to air missile, he’d still kick my arse six ways to Sunday. No, Jackie is still da man. I bow down to anyone who can defend himself against six goons with guns using just a soggy tea towel and a telephone bill.
But, and I say this most respectfully, the overall film is simply not funny/dramatic/action enough to make it any more than a maybe rental film at best, if nothing better is available.
Sorry Jackie. Please spare my life. I strained a muscle in my head just writing this review...
Jackie is one of the most likeable characters in film today, and he really does come across as someone who just wants to entertain us by jumping around the screen like a lunatic. Who can fault that? He does it so well, and for his age to be in the shape he is, well, darn it, he’s a legend.
Part of the fault with the story must lay with the fact that this seems to have been cut by about 20 minutes from the original version. I don’t know why, or what was taken, but it couldn’t have helped any.
It left me wanting more action, better fights and either a better story or no story at all. The transfer didn’t leave me wanting anything, it’s great.
