DIRECTOR
Tom Dey
SCREENWRITERS
Miles Millar
Alfred Gough
PRODUCERS
Gary Barber
Roger Birnbaum
Jonathan Glickman
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Daniel Mindel
MUSIC
Randy Edelman
EDITOR
Richard Chew
CAST
Jackie Chan (Chon Wang)
Owen Wilson (Roy O'Bannon)
Lucy Liu (Princess Pei Pei)
Brandon Merrill (Falling Leaves)
Roger Yuan (Lo Fong)
Xander Berkeley (Marshall Van Cleef)
Jason Connery (Andrews)
Walton Goggins (Wallace)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 110m
U.S. release: May 26, 2000
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
See also:
- Operation
Condor
- Rumble
in the Bronx
- Rush
Hour
- Shanghai
Knights
- Supercop
|
I
would prefer not to say that Jackie Chan, by the sheer power
of his goofy charisma, is able to cut our IQs in half and make
us accept cornball, lowball humor. I'd much rather say that he
wins us over -- invites us to become undiscriminating eight-year-olds
for two hours, laughing at whiskered jokes and hooting at elaborate
displays of chop-socky. If Chan has a co-star of equal charisma
-- Michelle Yeoh in Supercop,
say, or Owen Wilson in the new Shanghai Noon -- so much
the better.
Shanghai Noon is perfectly pleasant doofus entertainment.
Approaching 50, Jackie Chan still hasn't lost his taste for slapstick
mayhem; he dives into it with the gusto of a man half his age,
though perhaps a little more slowly these days. (Gone, it seems,
are the days when Chan could vanquish hordes of villains in one
amazing, unbroken cut; he's beginning to rely on editing to help
him out.) But Chan can still clown with the best of them, and
now that Jim Carrey is starting to dabble in more mature fare,
Chan is the last great physical comedian.
He gets a workout in Shanghai Noon, which transplants
him from the Forbidden City of China to the Wild West (it's 1881).
Chan plays Chon Wang, a bumbling Imperial Guard who goes to America
to find the kidnapped Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu), apparently
so named only so that someone can mispronounce it. Chon encounters
an equally bumbling train robber, Roy O'Bannon (Wilson), who
performs roughly the same function Chris Tucker did in Chan's
1998 Rush
Hour -- except that, unlike Tucker, Wilson isn't actively
annoying. Aloof at first, the two men gradually warm to each
other, in the time-honored buddy-movie fashion.
The movie walks the line between good stupid humor and embarrassing
stupid humor, and usually manages to stay on the good side. Partly,
I think, it's because Shanghai Noon has been made with
sincere affection for the Western genre; this isn't a cold, wannabe
hip mess like Wild
Wild West. Though allegedly set in 1881, the film hardly
tries to be true to how people talked or acted back then, especially
in the case of Roy, who is so 20th-century he's as much a fish-out-of-water
as Chon is -- Roy may be the only cowboy in movie history who
engages in self-defeating inner monologues ("You're gonna
die. He's gonna kill you") during a gunfight. Roy owes a
lot to Gene Wilder's character in Blazing Saddles; the
movie cribs a lot more than that from Mel Brooks' groundbreaking
spoof, but if you're in the mood for Shanghai Noon you're
not really in the mood for originality.
It also helps that the movie is as light-hearted as Chan himself.
The director, Tom Dey, is a Brown University graduate and TV-commercial
veteran (he works for Ridley Scott's firm) making his feature
debut; he distributes the gags at a steady pace, and if one of
them isn't that great, he shrugs and sets up the next one. And
he has a fine team in Chan and Wilson, whose acting styles --
Chan's antic slapstick and wounded dignity, Wilson's laid-back
befuddlement and contemporary irony -- mesh so well that the
characters actually seem to have a history together by the end.
This is one summer movie I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to.
One slight disappointment for Chan fans will be the end credits,
which traditionally show outtakes of Chan hurting himself when
a stunt goes wrong. We enjoy these outtakes not because we like
to see Chan in real pain, but because it adds to our appreciation
of what he goes through to entertain us. Here, the outtakes mostly
amount to Chan blowing his lines, which indicates that he's not
taking as many risks as he used to -- that, heaven forbid, he's
actually becoming sensible in his autumn years. Well,
if he's looking for a way to pass gracefully into less strenuous
movie work, he could do worse than Shanghai Noon, which
gives him a serviceable script, a director who stays out of the
way, and a bright co-star. I hope Chan remembers that formula
during the next decade or so. |
