Victory's World: Movie Reviews http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~vmaras1/reviewsidx.html
Twin Dragons (Dimension Films) Rated PG-13 Written by Barry Wong & Hark Tsui Directed by Ringo Lam & Hark Tsui
Review by Victory A. Marasigan
Jackie Chan kicks his way into Van Damme territory with Twin Dragons, an embarrassingly bland action comedy of mistaken identities. Chan plays separated-at-births Boomer and John Ma, whose drastically different paths...
Aw, forget the plot description, it's not even worth the space. But let's face it. No one goes to Jackie Chan movies for the plot anyway. The Scenes Where Nothing Happens in Chan's films have always been little more than glue thriftily spread to hold the action sequences together. In the case of Twin Dragons, however, the tiresome plot-driving scenes fritter away so much of the movie that you almost want to shout (at the risk of demeaning the artistic value of cinema), "Get to the good part already!"
Most of the film is devoted to showing the brothers' efforts to hide the other's existence from their own acquaintances. Why it is necessary to do this is not satisfactorily explained, but neither are a lot of aspects of the plot. The twins' love interests, demure club-singer Barbara (Chan-film regular Maggie Cheung) and lusty bride-hopeful Tammy (Nina Li Chi), get disoriented in all the brouhaha, yet strangely seem not to mind that they are not sure which brother they are in love with. The scenes describing the boys' bumbling antics get stretched so thin we stop caring who Chan is supposed to be in any given shot (In several shots, in fact, even the make-up and hair people seem to forget which brother is which.).
Even Chan's so-corny-it's-funny humor is off-kilter in this outing. Some of the gags are so carefully innocuous they're annoying. A case in point: whenever anyone sees the brothers together, they fall to the ground in a dead faint. Are we laughing yet?
As usual, the final showdown is the film's jewel, a tour de force display of Chan' s agility and grace. Never mind that it's not clear how the brothers end up fighting suited bad guys inside an automobile crash-testing facility. It's all good fun, but too little too late. Perhaps Chan's next movie should just be a collection of the last fight sequences of all of his movies. They could call it Jackie Chan's The Final Fight Scenes, and everybody would go home happy.
GRADE: D
Reviewed April 14, 1999 at Loews Theaters White Marsh, White Marsh, MD.
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