capsule : jackie chan teams up with his old buddy sammo hung to give us another zero-calorie fight-fest . gloriously foolish fun . my wife had this to say about mr . nice guy : " as entertainment , it's great . as a movie , it sucks . " i was forced to agree : the plot was an afterthought , the acting was hopeless , the script a throwaway . but it showcased jackie chan's raucous physical comedy -- " martial arts " is the wrong word for it -- and was therefore more than worth it . it isn't the all-out roar of joy that rumble in the bronx and especially supercop were , but it's still great fun . most movies that feature martial-arts action are about the giving and receiving of violent pain . jackie has a slightly goofier agenda , and is all the better for it -- even if he's in a paper-thin story . the plot ( what a word ! ) : jackie is a tv chef living in australia who specializes in on-screen acrobatics with his food . one day he collides with a journalist who's just filmed a drug deal that ended in violence , and there's a mix-up of tapes . this of course puts him right in the path of an endless stream of punks , henchmen , cigar-smoking baddies , and cops . that's about it-- but ther are a host of tiny little departures , like his girlfriend ( miki lee ) and his female assistant , who have a howlingly funny scene that , due to language barriers , cannot be repeated here . some things you gotta see to believe . jackie's stuntwork needs a new vocabulary to describe it : it's like play , or maybe a kind of dance . one scene has jackie getting into a fight in traffic -- on top of a flood of pepsi cans . another scene involves an unfinished building and a whole maze of doors opening into empty rooms and corridors . hung ( who directed ) plays it like an homage to the road runner and wile e . coyote cartoons . ( hung also films things a little more loosely and fluidly than staney tong did : we get a lot of steadicam work , lots of things going on in different sectors of the screen . ) another , even more mind-boggling scene , involves jackie being forced to fight with henchmen holding his limbs back with bungee cords . ( yes , he manages to get the upper hand with that one as well . don't ask how . ) the final scene gives us the grand guignol ( sans blood ) ending that a movie like this deserves . here's a hint : in the first five minutes , we see a giant earth-moving vehicle used to bury someone . seeing a thing like that in a movie like this is ( to quote roger ebert ) like camille coughing in the first reel and not dying in the last : it * has * to make an encore . i was right . only this time , jackie was driving . 
