If you were to make up a list of the hardest working movie stars, martial arts master Jackie Chan would definitely belong somewhere in the top ten. Although he's now in his late 40s and has completed at least 75 films, Chan, who apprenticed with such masters as the Peking Opera and Bruce Lee, continues to push his body to the limit in pursuit of new physical challenges.
Usually he finds a way to put a humorous spin on his stunts as well. In his American breakthrough picture "Rumble in the Bronx," for instance, he beat up villains using shopping carts and refrigerators. He dispatched some bad guys in "First Strike" by brandishing a ladder as adeptly as if it were a fencing foil. In "Rush Hour," he literally ran up a garden wall and propelled himself onto a tree branch.
No one can accuse him of not earning his paycheck.
Chan collects several bruises and reaps quite a few laughs in "Shanghai Noon" (the title is a slightly complicated spoof of Gary Cooper's "High Noon"), playing Chon Wang, a Forbidden City floor-scrubber who pursues the kidnapped princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) all the way to Nevada in the late 19th century. Along the way, the determined Wang confronts hostile Crow Indians in a fight that leads to some amazing tomahawk juggling, is saddled with a ridiculously stubborn horse and trades quips with Roy (Owen Wilson), an outlaw who's so chatty and such a bad shot he was thrown out of his own gang.
Wilson, who plays Roy as a 1980s Valley Guy trapped in the body of an 1880s gunslinger, meshes very comfortably with Chan, and even when the jokes are moldy, the duo cheerfully try to put them over anyway. Often you'll find yourself laughing even though the punchline turned out to be exactly what you expected.
Although there's plenty of violence and shooting, "Noon" somehow manages to stay reasonably sunny and lighthearted without resorting to the condescending who-cares-it's-just-a-movie attitude that sunk Mel Gibson's "Maverick" a few years back. Director Tom Dey, who trained in TV commercials, has an unfortunate habit of keeping his camera too close to the action, so much so that at times it's hard to see exactly who's doing what. But by the same token, Dey is smart enough to trust Chan and Wilson's instincts -- there are several clever scenes here that were almost certainly either partially or entirely improvised by the stars.
"Noon" squeezes a lot of comic mileage out of the sight of the silk-robed, ponytailed Wang mixing it up with cowboys and desperadoes. The Indians dub him Man-Who-Fights-In-Dress and the local sheriff brands him "the Shanghai Kid," which offends Wang slightly because, he explains, he's not from Shanghai. That's the least of Roy's worries: "Justice system's all screwed up," he snarls when he learns the bounty on Wang's head is $1,000 while the reward for Roy is a mere $500.
Of course, "Noon" wouldn't be a Chan movie if it didn't include a few eye-popping set pieces and Chan obliges by nimbly running up a collapsing pile of logs, doing a series of tricky moves on the slender catwalk of a bell tower, turning a piece of rope and a horseshoe into a lethal weapon, and managing to balance a sword on a wooden pole during a big fight. "Noon" also concludes with the traditional series of outtakes Chan fans expect, and they're well worth sticking around to see. James Sanford
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