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Gorgeous

On a small Taiwanese island, a young girl called Bu finds a love message in a bottle from a Hong Kong man called Albert. Struck by the romance of it she decides to go to Hong Kong to find him. When she gets there she is disappointed to find out Albert had written the message for his boyfriend. To make up for it he invites her on a luxury yacht, where she sees Jackie's character (C.N.Chan) pull up to another yacht in his speedboat and go on board. He's been set up by his business competitor Howie Lo, who's found out CN has been seeing his girlfriend. CN tries to escape, but his boat has drifted out of reach, but towards Bu, who drives over to rescue him. She crashes on the way back and they are forced to spend the night alone on an island.
The next day they are rescued and return to CN's expensive apartment. Bu is overwhelmed by it all and returns to Albert to ask him what she should do, as she's fallen for CN. To win his sympathy she pretends she's the missing girlfriend of a gangster mentioned in the paper and stages a mugging to make him fear for her safety. Some of Lo's men turn up, but CN fights them off so Lo decides he will humiliate CN by hiring a lighter foreign fighter to defeat him in combat.
While CN and Bu are at dinner Lo turns up with his hired fighter and CN is forced to fight, and eventually loses. He laments that business has softened him and resolves to go back into training. A few days later Bu discovers that CN already knew she wasn't the gangster's girlfriend and she feels he was just leading her on, so she returns to Taiwan. Feeling out of sorts CN is moping in his factory when Lo's goons turn up saying they're out of a job because, thanks to CN, Lo's stock crashed. With them is the hired fighter looking for another fight. Once again CN is forced to comply...

Much like the Lucky Stars films, Gorgeous suffers from an uneasy combination of two types of film - in this case a light romance and a kickboxing film. The main romantic thrust of the film is effective, but the main reason to watch a Jackie Chan film is usually the action. The result is that the action scenes actually seem incongruous - and they're of sufficent length and intensity that when they end you've almost forgotten what stage the story was at.
The big fight scenes are extremely impressive testaments to Jackie's physical abilities (if a little too slapstick) and the film is worth seeing for that reason, although they're not as inventive as some of his fights (apart from the baseball bat scene) and some bits are clearly speeded up. If you liked the fight with Benny Urquidez at the end of Dragon's Forever, the two one-on-one fights in Gorgeous will be right up your street.
Note: This is a review of the horribly dubbed American version, with evidence of sledgehammer editing and a mismatch between the cover details and what is mentioned in the film (did Jackie write it or not?). It's got a PG rating and the ratings box describes the violence as occasional, mild and slapstick. Too true.

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