Posts Tagged ‘Jackie Chan’
Thursday, June 5th, 2025
In the 15 years (!) since the KARATE KID remake I’ve occasionally found myself telling people, “No, seriously, it’s pretty good!” Which is not really what I said in my review at the time, now that I’m re-reading it. So who knows, but I don’t think I’ll be saying that about the new movie KARATE KID: LEGENDS. I won’t try to convince anyone it’s a particularly good movie. But I kinda liked it. Let me say this: it’s definitely way better than THE NEXT KARATE KID, which actually I have to admit I kind of enjoy too.
The cleverest thing about LEGENDS is what we already knew from the trailers: it finds a way to say that the 1984 original and its 2010 remake are not mutually exclusive. In this one the remake’s shifu Han (Jackie Chan, DRAGON BLADE) recruits o.g. karate kid Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio, HITCHCOCK) to help him teach a student, and this in turn is a way to make sense out of the weird title discrepancy that they wanted to make a movie called THE KARATE KID but they cast Jackie Chan so it was about kung fu. Now screenwriter Rob Lieber (PETER RABBIT) invents a relationship between the Han and Miyagi families, and therefore between their kung fu and karate styles. So when one of Mr. Han’s students wants to enter a karate tournament, the shifu wants him to learn specifically Miyagi-do karate from its last known teacher. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Baniaga, Aramis Knight, Ben Wang, Jackie Chan, Jonathan Entwistle, Joshua Jackson, Ming-Na Wen, Ralph Macchio, Rob Lieber, Sadie Stanley, Tim Rozon, Wyatt Oleff, Xiangyang Xu, Yankei Ge
Posted in Reviews, Action, Drama, Martial Arts, Sport | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, February 25th, 2025
I’m generally a sucker for an international co-production action movie, especially the ones based in Chinese martial arts but with some western stars. For example the one with Milla Jovovich, or the one with Coolio, or NAKED WEAPON. But I’m suspicious of these big period piece ones with an American star or two outside of their usual context. I’ve even hesitated to pull the trigger on the one with Arnold in it. I’m still a defender of THE GREAT WALL, but most of these are not Zhang Yimou joints. It’s easy to assume that the Hollywood guy is phoning it in for a paycheck and the international producers are trying to coast on name value, leaving us to be bored by a bunch of yelling and sword clanging and CG armies.
DRAGON BLADE (2015) also has the hurdle of being a late-period Jackie Chan movie, but it defies the odds. Give or take some of the awkwardness of the format, this is an entertaining (and charmingly corny) story about what happens when a rogue Roman legion link up with a badass squad of disavowed Chinese peacemakers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adrien Brody, Daniel Lee, Jackie Chan, John Cusack, Lin Peng, Mika Wang, Sharni Vinson
Posted in Reviews, Action, Martial Arts | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, January 29th, 2025
I swear I didn’t plan to be overexposed on podcasts this month, I just take them when I can get ’em and this is how it works out sometimes. When All ’90s Action, All the Time! invited me to come on this season I thought a great movie to talk about would be RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. Obviously it was one of Jackie Chan’s big breakthroughs in the west, even more obviously it is by far the most realistic depiction of New York and gangs ever put on film, including documentaries filmed in New York about actual gangs. It was an important movie to me and sums up some things about the personality of the decade.
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Tags: Jackie Chan, podcasts
Posted in Blog Post (short for weblog) | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 15th, 2023
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM is exactly what I hoped we’d start seeing after SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE: more animated features feeling they have permission to go wild with their visual styles. Directors Jeff Rowe and Keyler Spears already took the baton and ran with it two years ago in THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES; MUTANT MAYHEM shares that film’s anarchic doodles-on-your-notebook spirit and preference for cartoonish exaggeration. But this time they’ve largely abandoned three-dimensional computer animation’s longstanding quest for realistic textures in favor of artistic flair. Not only the backgrounds, but even the characters look like energetic oil pastel sketches. Even objects that appear tactile are covered in lines, squiggles, smears. Light-colored scratches on swaths of black give the impression of reflections or lights, but also of lines drawn by human hands. Computerized precision takes a back seat to creative looseness and chaos. Every frame looks like the concept art that you see in the making-of coffee table books, as if they somehow removed that final step that polishes things but inevitably loses some of their personality. The personality is intact.
It’s also like SPIDER-VERSE in that it’s a fun animated all ages super hero tale with plenty of laughs, good music, and some emotional substance. And until we have too many of those, I enjoy that too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Atticus Ross, Ayo Edebiri, Brady Noon, Evan Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito, Ice Cube, Jackie Chan, Jeff Rowe, John Cena, Keyler Spears, Micah Abbey, Nicolas Cantu, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Shamon Brown Jr., Trent Reznor
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Comic strips/Super heroes | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, November 24th, 2021
You know how it is – sometimes the mood hits you for a little martial arts/horror combo, specifically the type found in Hong Kong vampire movies from the early 2000s, so you check out two of them. At least that’s how I dealt with the problem. The first one in my double feature, VAMPIRE EFFECT (2003) credits Dante Lam (BEAST COPS, THE STOOL PIGEON) as director and none other than Donnie Yen (HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME) as “co-director” and “action director.” Unsurprisingly, the action is the best part.
The original title is TWINS EFFECT, because it stars a pop duo called Twins, made up of Charlene Choi and Gillian Chung. But nobody knows what that is here and there are no twins in the movie, so I guess this is our equivalent to when Germany changed ROVER DANGERFIELD to ROVER & DAISY. And this is another one of those pop star vehicle movies that doesn’t really have an equivalent here exactly. I mean, you don’t see Tegan and Sara doing a vampire movie. So far.
Choi stars as Helen, a heartbroken young woman who, while grieving a breakup, hits it off with a vampire prince named Kazaf (Edison Chen, GEN-X COPS 2: METAL MAYHEM) who’s enjoying a glass of blood in a fancy restaurant. She doesn’t realize what he is, even though she has some knowledge of such matters because her brother Reeve (Ekin Cheng, YOUNG & DANGEROUS) is a vampire hunter. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anthony Wong, Anya, Charlene Choi, Chunhua Ji, Danny Chan, Dante Lam, Edison Chen, Ekin Cheng, Gillian Chung, Herman Yau, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Josie Ho, Ken Chang, Lam Suet, Michael Chow, Mickey Hardt, Tsui Hark, vampires, Wellson Chin, Yu Rongguang
Posted in Horror, Martial Arts, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2020
August 23, 1985
Here we are again. THE PROTECTOR – Jackie Chan’s widely panned second attempt at an English-language starring vehicle. I reviewed it in 2011 and my opinion hasn’t changed much, but as one of the very few straight ahead action movies of Summer of 1985, it seems important to address in this series. Action-wise, the summer was all about RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II. Otherwise you just had the two westerns, PALE RIDER and SILVERADO, and three cop movies – CODE OF SILENCE, YEAR OF THE DRAGON, and this. YEAR OF THE DRAGON is less actiony and has so much more production value it doesn’t seem like a fair comparison, so the one to really hold it next to is CODE OF SILENCE.
And yeah, it makes sense. Chuck Norris and Jackie were both martial arts stars – in fact, guys who had early roles in Bruce Lee movies – who were now expanding their portfolios in the medium of post-DIRTY HARRY American cop movies. CODE is set in director Andrew Davis’s textured and gritty Chicago, but director James Glickenhaus begins THE PROTECTOR in a preposterously exaggerated b-movie vision of the South Bronx where crime is so bad it has literally become a post-apocalypse movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill "Superfoot" Wallace, Danny Aiello, Jackie Chan, James Glickenhaus, Roy Chiao, Summer of 1985, Victor Arnold
Posted in Action, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2020
When we last saw Wong Fei-hung (Jackie Chan), he was a bratty kid always getting in trouble, getting disowned by his martial artist/physician father Master Wong, trained in drunken boxing by Beggar So, learning to fight really well if he has access to a gourd he can use to get blitzed out of his, you know, gourd.
Now its… I’m not sure how long later. But it’s the early twentieth century. There are cars and shit. Though he’s presumably an adult, he still lives with his parents – now played by Ti Lung (A BETTER TOMORROW) and Anita Mui (RUMBLE IN THE BRONX) – and fucks around and gets in trouble constantly.
When DRUNKEN MASTER came out in 1978, Jackie was just beginning to explore his comedic approach to kung fu movies, and it established him as a major movie star in China. Sixteen years later, when DRUNKEN MASTER II (a.k.a. THE LEGEND OF THE DRUNKEN MASTER) came out, Jackie and martial arts cinema were in an entirely different place. Jackie had moved over to Golden Harvest, directed ten movies, started the POLICE STORY and ARMOUR OF GOD series, even done a few American movies. And then he returned to the famous folk hero character in the only time he was ever directed by the great Lau Kar-leung (EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN, THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, HEROES OF THE EAST, DIRTY HO, THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, TIGER ON BEAT). But they fought about the shooting and fighting styles and Jackie took over to direct the final fight that the movie’s best known for. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anita Mui, drunken boxing, Felix Wong, Jackie Chan, Ken Lo, Lau Kar-Leung, Ti Lung, Wong Fei-hung
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 14 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2020
In February of 1996, when RUMBLE IN THE BRONX was released in the U.S., it was an event. I don’t know if it was the zeitgeist or a concerted marketing effort or what, but it came along at the exact right moment for Jackie Chan to achieve his dream of hitting it big in the States. He’d tried twice before with American movies filmed in English: Robert Clouse’s THE BIG BRAWL a.k.a. BATTLE CREEK BRAWL in 1980 and James Glickenhaus’s THE PROTECTOR in 1985. Neither caught on. But he finally did it with a re-edited and dubbed version of one of his Hong Kong movies.
For some of us, we’d had a few years of fiending to see and learn about whatever Hong Kong action cinema we could. Trying to find rentals or bootlegs of subtitled John Woo, maybe Ringo Lam, THE HEROIC TRIO, FONG SAI YUK, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR, or anything Jackie.
Most of those were about a certain poetry, a certain vibe, a mix of style and cool and honor and brotherhood and violence that seemed thrilling compared to what we got at home. But the excitement of Jackie was entirely about the miracle of human movement. A guy who can flip and run up walls and jump off buildings and onto or over moving vehicles. A daredevil and a silent comedian and a kung fu master all rolled into one. He wasn’t cool in the same way that Chow Yun Fat was. He was kind of a dork. But also a god. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bill Tung, Francoise Yip, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Stanley Tong
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 36 Comments »
Thursday, April 9th, 2020
As I believe I’ve made clear in many reviews over the years, as well as this week’s Profiles in Badass column on Rebeller, I’m aware of Michelle Yeoh’s wide range of talents and accomplishments. I love her most for the movies that really showcase her fighting and her swagger, like WING CHUN, and YES, MADAM!, or her fighting and her regret, like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, and the totally-worth-checking-out straight-to-Netflix sequel, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY. I also very much admire her dramatic acting chops from AH KAM to CRAZY RICH ASIANS. Still, the timing of my specific movie-watching path, discovering Hong Kong action in the ‘90s, means that I will always think of her as Michelle “jumped a motherfucking motorcycle onto a motherfucking train in SUPERCOP” Yeoh. That’s just a fact. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Athena Chu, Big Yank, Bill Tung, Dick Wei, Emil Chau, Fan Siu-Wong, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Popeye, Stanley Tong, Yu Rongguang
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, July 9th, 2019
WHEELS ON MEALS is the 1984 Hong Kong action classic starring Chinese opera bros for life Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung (also director), fresh off of WINNERS AND SINNERS and PROJECT A. Jackie and Biao star as Thomas and David, dorky cousins who live together in Barcelona, sharing a bedroom that has separate doors right next to each other for no reason other than a visual gag. In the opening we see them getting up, working out and practicing on kung fu dummies, so that when they’re amazing fighters through the rest of it there’s a foundation for it. (But we never see them practice again.)
Sammo plays a guy named Moby, who’s introduced sporting shades and a perm that almost looks like jheri curls. He’s working (without pay) for a sleazy p.i. (Herb Edelman, a.k.a. Dorothy’s ex-husband Stanley on Golden Girls) who leaves town to hide from a gambling debt and leaves Moby in charge, causing him to strut around town dressed like he’s in the “Smooth Criminal” video, whisper-bragging to everyone that he’s “Acting Chairman of Matt’s Detective Agency.” He also takes a case to find a woman from an old photograph (oh my god this could turn into THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) and it seems like all he really knows how to do is look for some guy named Fatso to ask him about it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, Herb Edelman, Hong Kong action, Jackie Chan, Keith Vitali, Lola Forner, Sammo Hung, Spain, Yuen Biao
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 37 Comments »
