Movie: Chinese Zodiac (2012)
Director: Jackie Chan
Cast: Jackie Chan
Rating: **1/2
Before people start hurling abuses at me for writing a biased review, let me put it out on the table that I am a huge Jackie Chan fan. I will try to be as honest as I can and contain the fan-boy inside of me. This movie is supposedly the swan song of the legendary Kung-Fu maestro. A phenomenal career spanning four decades, over 150 movies and countless injuries, have finally taken its toll. Believe it or not, he is 58 years old now and still doing his own stunts. For this movie he made a new Guinness world record : “Most stunts performed by a living actor”. With so much riding on the movie, the expectations were sky high from all Jackie Chan fans across the globe.
But even to the most ardent Jackie Chan fan this movie was a tad disappointing. Give the movie to an arm-chair reviewer and they will nit pick about plot holes, no character building etc. For a Jackie Chan movie, these points are moot. The story is an elaborate excuse for Jackie Chan and his stunt team to design breathtaking and death defying stunts, with a slight sprinkling of slap stick thrown on top. So the only real standard that can hold up for a Jackie Chan movie, is a Jackie Chan movie. That is a lofty scale and this movie falls short, way short.
The movie is touted as a successor to the immensely successful Armour of God franchise. Jackie Chan revives his treasure hunter avatar which is hired by an antiques collector to steal the 12 bronze heads representing the Chinese zodiacs. The movie kicks off with a small history lesson showing that these bronze heads were plundered by British soldiers and then got scattered across the globe. In his hunt for the bronze heads, JC kicks onto high gear with an insane chase sequence that has him escaping armed Russian soldiers wearing a roller blade suit (go figure). Sadly that is the highest that the movie goes in terms of action. Then the plot moves onto Paris where JC masquerading as a discovery channel photographer befriends Coco, a Chinese nationalist working to restore the lost relics to China. Together they team up with the french duchess Catherine and embark upon an adventure to hunt down the lost relics.
The characters for inexplicable reasons switch between mandarin, french and some badly dubbed English. The movie theater where I was watching the movie had no subtitles, so to me it was utter gibberish. But the gist of it was that whenever it was Mandarin, Coco would go on a monolog lecturing us how awesome China is and how English/French are thugs. Even though the characters within the movie would request to please speak in English, but to no avail. The audience is as confused as the characters regarding what’s going on. Their misadventures continue where they land up in an island where they encounter pirates, search for lost treasures and fight some more. It was sad to see Jackie Chan using CGI instead of practical effects. I know I am being a puritan but I guess with Jackie Chan, I have a different level of expectations. The only other high you get from the movie is when JC gets into a friendly spar with a rival treasure hunter. There you see some trademark Jackie Chan action. But it has an all too familiar feeling.
By this time you will have switched off completely and just waiting for the ordeal to end. This is a really tragic downfall for such a legend, whose name is taken in the same breath as Bruce Lee. In the pantheons of martial arts cinema, Jackie Chan’s star will always shine the brightest. His last venture as an action hero may not be remembered pleasantly but that should not detract us from the fact that he truly is, in every sense of the word.
