I may possibly be one of the few people
left who were huge Jackie Chan fans back in the early 90's when I discovered
Hong Kong cinema who still enjoy his current Viagra films to some degree.
Of course, they are nothing like those old movies when he basically created
his own genre of film - a couple decades of aging has taken care of that
but they still have their moments and he shifts his stories around enough
for me. And it is fucking Jackie Chan who for all his selling out to the
Communist Party is still a living legend.
The fact that he is even still doing this
stuff is amazing to me. We are about the same age and I have trouble getting
up stairs without a little huffing. So I give him kudos for that. Sure he
feels like an artifact of another age and he has brought down the risk factor
enormously, but his films even today feel unique - there is nothing else
out there like his movies for good or bad. That can definitely be said about
Bleeding Steel. This risk factor lessening can be seen easily in the videos
of things gone wrong that always run over the end credits. In the old days
they were amazing stunts gone wrong; in this one it is basically people breaking
into laughter.
Which is understandable. They must have
been reading the script. The script must have come out of adults collecting
drawings of five year old boys and saying I think there is a movie here.
It makes no sense. At all. I would either have to be a genius or an idiot
to follow it. At one point Jackie grows a new arm and I thought - when did
he lose his arm? How did she run away in only her clothes and somehow end
up on an airplane to China 20 minutes later? Where did those 13 years go?
Why doesn't anyone look older? Please someone help this old man. Me, I mean.
This all has to do with some radioactive
regeneration something or another that people are after - one admittedly
being a very cool female killer in leather - it jumps around from Hong Kong
to Sydney where it looks like a fight takes place on the top of the Sydney
Opera House but I assume that was just special effects. Killers, mutants,
bullet proof men with some punk kids who look like they escaped from Rumble
in the Bronx all get in on the act. But at the end of the day I kind of enjoyed
how ridiculous this was. Cute girls, gunplay, martial arts, dopey comedy,
an aging Jackie Chan is better than a poke in the eye. And there is a lot
of action.
