Mr. Nice Guy (1998) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
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.
syegul@cablehouse.dyn.ml.org
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews