jackie chan may not make the best films , but there's no question that he makes some of the most entertaining and audience-friendly ones . " it's not bach , " a friend once said , " but it is at least offenbach . " " who am i ? " , a hong kong production which was released direct-to-video through columbia tristar , is very much in the same vein as " rumble in the bronx " . its plot is mostly a clothesline on which jackie hangs as many stunts , visual gags , bits of derring-do , slapstick , and everything else that isn't hammered down . and what of the plot , you ask ? jackie plays a member of a secret military platoon who're deployed to get their hands on a meteorite fragment that can be used as an energy source . the platoon is betrayed from within , and jackie takes a chuteless nosedive from his helicopter . he wakes up , sans memory , in the care of a jungle tribe . " who am i ? " he cries out , and the running ( homeric ? ) gag of the movie is that whoami becomes his name . ( the tribe , btw , is depicted with a surprising amount of sensitivity and intelligence given the movie's pedigree . they've got t-shirts and binoculars , and understand that jackie fell out of a crashed copter , not some great metal sky-bird . ) the movie actually gets a lot less mileage out of jackie's memory loss as a plot device , but it gets a lot of mileage regardless . jackie saves a motorcross driver from snakebite ( driving the atv over the finish line himself ) ; gets mixed up with a journalist who wants to write about his story ; wrecks a mitsubishi sports car ; winds up in the netherlands , throwing wooden shoes at the bad guys ; and gets into a rooftop fight with two astonishingly brutal savate' fighters . the usual stuff , but it's served up with a good sense of fun and a fast-moving camera . and of course , we get to see jackie's end-of-movie outtakes . it wouldn't be a jackie chan film without at least one shot of him on the stretcher -- although this time around , we get to * hear * outtakes as well , from the studio sessions where jackie sang the title tune . and as a singer , jackie's mostly a pretty good stuntman . like the man says : not bach , i guess , but certainly offenbach . -----------== posted via deja news , the discussion network ==---------- <a href= " http : //www . dejanews . com/ " >http : //www . dejanews . com/</a> search , read , discuss , or start your own 
