Who Am I? (1998) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
Jackie Chan may not make the best films, but there's no question that he makes some of the most entertaining and audience-friendly ones. "It's not Bach," a friend once said, "but it is at least Offenbach."
"Who Am I?", a Hong Kong production which was released direct-to-video through Columbia TriStar, is very much in the same vein as "Rumble in the Bronx". Its plot is mostly a clothesline on which Jackie hangs as many stunts, visual gags, bits of derring-do, slapstick, and everything else that isn't hammered down.
And what of the plot, you ask? Jackie plays a member of a secret military platoon who're deployed to get their hands on a meteorite fragment that can be used as an energy source. The platoon is betrayed from within, and Jackie takes a chuteless nosedive from his helicopter. He wakes up, sans memory, in the care of a jungle tribe. "Who am I?" he cries out, and the running (Homeric?) gag of the movie is that Whoami becomes his name. (The tribe, BTW, is depicted with a surprising amount of sensitivity and intelligence given the movie's pedigree. They've got T-shirts and binoculars, and understand that Jackie fell out of a crashed copter, not some Great Metal Sky-Bird.)
The movie actually gets a lot less mileage out of Jackie's memory loss as a plot device, but it gets a lot of mileage regardless. Jackie saves a motorcross driver from snakebite (driving the ATV over the finish line himself); gets mixed up with a journalist who wants to write about his story; wrecks a Mitsubishi sports car; winds up in the Netherlands, throwing wooden shoes at the bad guys; and gets into a rooftop fight with two astonishingly brutal savate' fighters. The usual stuff, but it's served up with a good sense of fun and a fast-moving camera.
And of course, we get to see Jackie's end-of-movie outtakes. It wouldn't be a Jackie Chan film without at least one shot of him on the stretcher -- although this time around, we get to *hear* outtakes as well, from the studio sessions where Jackie sang the title tune. And as a singer, Jackie's mostly a pretty good stuntman. Like the man says: not Bach, I guess, but certainly Offenbach.
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