# Shanghai Noon (2000)

### reviewed by
Christian Pyle

    Shanghai Noon
    Reviewed by Christian Pyle
    Directed by Tom Dey
    Written by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough
    Starring Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, and Lucy Liu
    Grade: C

It seemed like a good idea: import the superstars of Hong Kong's successful action films and put them in American action movies. So far, though, the Hollywood efforts of Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat, Jet Li, and director John Woo have failed to measure up to their work in Hong Kong. Chan, the most popular member of the group with American audiences, is the most difficult to fit to an American genre. Why? Because Hollywood doesn't make "Jackie Chan movies." The closest equivalent America has had to Chan's unique style were the silent comedies of Buster Keaton. In the films of both Chan and Keaton, the emphasis is on "gags" (stunts) that are simultaneously thrilling, hilarious, and graceful while the lead character is reduced to a simple persona that the star plays in every movie and the plot is a loosely woven justification for the gags. Ironically, therefore, Chan may have found a better fit with the Hollywood of the 1920's than with Hollywood today. When sound came in, they stopped making "Buster Keaton movies" and could not find a niche for the stone-faced star. There was even a disastrous attempt to pair Keaton with Jimmy Durante in a series of sound comedies. Some seventy years later, Chan has found himself with the same sort of awkward mismatch as Hollywood has inserted him into two "buddy movies": 1998's "Rush Hour" and the new "Shanghai Noon."

As in "Rush Hour," Chan's character has come to America from the East to save a kidnapped woman. This time around it's 1881, and imperial guardsman Chon Wang (Jackie Chan) is part of a contingent from China's Forbidden City to deliver a ransom of 100,000 pieces of gold to a mission in Carson City, Nevada, and retrieve Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu). The princess thought she was escaping China and an loathsome arranged marriage when she was betrayed and found herself kidnapped instead by Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), a former member of the Imperial Guard who was exiled for treason. Chon gets separated from his comrades when Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson) and his gang rob their train. O'Bannon is also cut adrift when he's double-crossed by a new member of the gang (Walt Goggins). After some initial fighting and a detour or two, Chon and Roy team-up to find the princess. Along the way, they have to fend off Lo Fong, Marshal Van Cleef (Xander Berkeley) and his posse, and the other imperial guards (Cui Ya Hi, Rong Guang Yu, and Eric Chen).

References to classic westerns abound. Chon Wang sounds like John Wayne when pronounced with Chan's accent ("That's an awful cowboy name," responds Roy). Berkeley is made up to look like his character's namesake, Lee Van Cleef, who starred alongside Clint Eastwood in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." There's a well-executed homage at the end to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," as well. To its credit, "Shanghai Noon" avoids cliches, for the most part. (I assumed there'd be a runaway stagecoach in there somewhere, but there wasn't.) At one point, Roy even rejects a cliche. Roy and Chon are in jail, and Chon suggests, "I'll pretend to be sick." Roy replies, "Does that still work in China? Because, I gotta tell you, in America it's been done to death."

The way they do break out of the cell is one of the funniest moments in the movie. There's another sidesplitting scene when the guys get drunk in a cathouse. Other than those two scenes, there were more laughs in the outtakes at the end than in the movie itself. Like "Rush Hour," the script for "Shanghai Noon" is thin and uneven. There are lots of gaps that left me scratching my head. For example, at one point Chon has climbed to the top of a snow-capped mountain with more of the same stretching before him. Cut to Chon by a stream near a forest. What happened to the mountains? Another befuddlement: for some reason, Van Cleef and Lo Fong think that Roy has the ransom gold, but the gold was never stolen. The other guardsmen have it throughout the movie. Only the most minimal gestures are made towards character development. One central character, a Native American woman Chon mistakenly marries (Brandon Merrill), is so underdeveloped that the closing credits refer to her simply as "Indian wife." Normally we expect a lack of plot and character development in a "Jackie Chan movie"; plots and characters exist only to link the stunts and fight scenes together. However, when Chan goes out of his own genre and into an American buddy pic, the requirements of the latter genre and the sparseness of the fast-paced action sequences of Chan's Cantonese features makes the plot much more important. The feeble scripts of "Rush Hour" and "Shanghai Noon" would likely be rejected by any popular American action hero, but producers probably think, "Hey, Jackie's movies don't have plots anyway."

Despite it all, Chan is still Chan. There are some wonderfully inventive fight scenes where Chan gets to strut his stuff, and he has a lot of fun with western-themed props like tomahawks and six-guns. The best moment: he fashions a weapon out of a horseshoe and a rope. However, if this were a real "Jackie Chan movie," there would be a lot more of these moments, and the movie would be a lot more fun. I hope the next time Chan goes west, he travels by way of Hong Kong.

Bottom line: It's "Rush Hour 2: The Early Years."

    © 2000 Christian L. Pyle

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