Jackie Chan finally achieved star status in the United States with the buddy cop movie, Rush Hour in 1998, but let Chris Tucker steal most of the spotlight. Two years later, Touchstone Pictures has released a buddy western movie, Shanghai Noon, with Owen Wilson taking over the Chris Tucker role. However, Wilson lacks Tucker’s charisma and Chan carries the movie on his own.
Like Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon features Chan as a “fish-out-of-water” in the United States. This time, rather than being a top Hong Kong detective, Chan is Chon Wang, a Chinese Imperial Guard sent to the United States to retrieve Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu), who has been kidnapped from the Forbidden City. When the train he is on is robbed by a gang led by Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson), Chon finds himself separated from his fellow guardsmen. After a series of run-ins, O’Bannon and Wang team up to find the princess.
Shanghai Noon never takes itself seriously and that’s one of its many strengths. The movie is sweet, silly and full of the requisite action that a Jackie Chan movie needs to succeed. The action sequences in this film are above and beyond those featured in Rush Hour, giving Chan fanatics what they go to a Jackie Chan movie to see: fast, furious and frequently funny fight scenes. There are precious few of the jaw-dropping, life-threatening stunts that Chan is famous for, which is understandable. Chan, at 46 years old, isn’t getting any younger. He still can dance his way through a fight scene like no other martial artist I’ve ever seen and that’s well worth the price of admission.
The film provides a few good laughs, several chuckles and a large dose of the steady grins. The comedy is fairly predictable, but good-natured. Aside from a few sex and drug-related jokes, the film is almost family fare, but it never seems watered down to cater to younger audiences. It also includes a fair number of nods to older Westerns, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Italian “spaghetti westerns” of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
While the movie won’t get many nods from historical nitpickers, Shanghai Noon is an amicable tale that features just enough plot to string together the action scenes. It’s nice to see Chan in another high quality, high profile domestic release that is sure to win him more American fans.
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
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