#JACKIE CHAN FILM COLLECTION DVD COVER MOVIE#
You need more than just chemistry between your leads to tell a good story and this movie didn't have that. The story is lame, the action isn't memorable and the editing is awful.
It was watchable enough with Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville having some good chemistry, but that's all they relied on. I don't wanna say this movie had potential, because it really didn't, but this should have been better than it actually was. It is what it is, but it's not a particularly effective scene. And even then, why would the entire Mongolian village join in? That's the part that gets me and the part that makes the scene so bad. You could say that it helps to show Connor (Knoxville) a different side to Benny (Chan), who's always portrayed as super serious. It's such a bad scene and it literally makes no sense regardless of whatever context you try to look at it in.
Like Jackie and the entire Mongolian village breaking into a cover of Adele's Rolling in the Deep. And there's some downright cringe-worthy scenes. And, as I mentioned, the narrative is not particularly essential to the actual film. The jokes are tired, the action is a bit bland and the editing is an absolute mess. As I mentioned, Johnny and Jackie do have some chemistry, but I do not believe the movie exploits that as well as it could, because the material they have doesn't really allow them to do much. The story, as far as I'm concerned, is just there to get Johnny and Jackie next to their bit of buddy film stereotypes where they banter. Particularly if you even know the absolute basic of Hong Kong cinema. The problem is, though, that the story that's around them is literally nothing to write home about with a twist/reveal that you can see coming from one million light years away. And since this is the role he plays here, he does a pretty good job and he obviously has chemistry with Jackie. I'm not saying that he's the next Daniel Day-Lewis, but he's good as the annoying sidekick. Johnny Knoxville, once you overlook that Jackass made him famous, isn't a bad actor in the slightest. And, honestly, Johnny and Jackie make a surprisingly solid pairing. But the similarities are obviously there.
Chan obviously risked his body in films that had some semblance of narrative, so you can't really truly say that they do the same thing for the same reasons. Knoxville may have done it in a setting where it's just a bunch of dudes hurting themselves for the audience's amusement, but he's still risking his body. That might be a blasphemous comparison to some, but both guys have pretty much put their bodies on the line for their specific style of film. And, now that I think about it, I can see the similarities between the two. Yes, the same Johnny Knoxville from Jackass. In this movie, the Chris Tucker/Owen Wilson role is filled by Johnny Knoxville. Rush Hour doesn't fall into that category, but you had a fast-talking, quick-witter Chris Tucker for him to play off of.
You have Jackie, who always plays the idealistic and honorable type, against someone who's the exact opposite of him. I digress, this movie relies on the formula set forth by Rush Hour and Shanghai Knights/Noon. This obviously isn't counting his work in films like Kung Fu Panda, which he is a relative small part of. Maybe not so much now that he hasn't had a major box office success, at least on this side of the world, since Rush Hour 3 and even that movie wasn't that hugely successful. Jackie is obviously not the world's greatest actor, though I think he's better than many people give him credit for, but he's always had a very affable personality and people are drawn to him because of that. There's still action, but that's not necessarily the entire focus on the film. A lot of the latter day Jackie movies have relied more on his name and his considerable charm more than anything else. Jackie still remains a complete and utter legend, his legacy has already been established and he doesn't need to take any more unnecessary risks at his age. That's not a criticism of Jackie at all, it's just that age catches up to everyone, even people that earlier in their careers might have seemed invincible. And I say that because you get to see Jackie harmed by stuff that he would have brushed off in the 80s. One of the sadder elements of this is watching the outtakes that they always show post-credits. I seem to say this a lot in latter-day Jackie Chan movies, but it's almost sad to watch him in films like this simply based on the fact that he simply cannot do what he did when he was a younger man.