SHANGHAI NOON
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Jackie Chan brings his martial
arts antics to the Old West, A Chinese Imperial
Guard from the Forbidden City in Beijing is sent
to the America West to rescue a kidnapped
princess. The performances are fun, but the
plotting is a string of cliches. Rating: 5 (0
to 10), low +1 (-4 to +4)
Even worse than the spy genre, the Western genre is in clear decline. The film industry has lost the recipe for making good riveting Westerns. Now they can make only repetitive parodies that mock the conventions of the Western and which do not have the soul that made Westerns great. The features that used to come cheap--the horses and the scenery--now make Westerns prohibitively expensive to make. Perhaps the Western will return with digitized horses and blue screen sunsets, who knows? I spared myself last year's THE WILD, WILD WEST, but SHANGHAI NOON looked moderately better. It probably was.
Bringing a Chinese martial artist to the Old West has some of the same possibilities as bringing a samurai in the only partially successful mixture of genres of RED SUN (1971). Sure enough, this film has all the standard Western cliches we could have listed BEFORE seeing the film. We have a moving train robbery (only slightly less cliched is the fact it is committed by amateurs and incompetents). We have a visit to a cathouse. We have an escape from an evil sheriff's jail. We have a visit to an Indian village. And, of course, there is a saloon brawl. And there is a showdown on a town street. Miles Millar and Alfred Gough seem to have written the script with a checklist. Each cliche circumstance is revisited with an eye toward how it might be a little different if a comic Chinese martial artist involved. Even so nothing more creative than a three-way fistfight is attempted. There are also wide vistas filmed to stirring music whetting our appetites for a real Western, but the film only reminds us that the film industry has lost that particular ability.
The film opens in Beijing, in the Forbidden City. Chon Wang (played by Jackie Chan) is a hapless member of the Imperial Guard, charged with scrubbing floors and protecting Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Alexis Liu). The princess, wishing to avoid an arranged marriage, agrees to be taken to Carson City, Nevada. Along the way she realizes that her companion is really kidnapping her. Wang is sent to Nevada with his uncle to rescue her. The uncle is killed when the train is robbed by a band of inept train robbers. Chon teams with their leader Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson) in an attempt to save the princess. What does all this have to do with Shanghai or noon? Not a thing. But by giving the film a pointless name the writers could squeeze one more joke out. Many of the gags will be familiar including the "horsing around" of a trained horse. One weakness of the script is the dependency on one character, who shall remain nameless here, who gets the characters out of several nasty patches, but otherwise seems never to be around. This is just too easy an answer for how the main characters are going to escape their problems.
In spite of the rather unimaginative plotting and scripting Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan each turn in engaging performances. Remarkably, Wilson holds his own against Chan, perhaps even making himself the more interesting character. The stress is less on Chan's martial arts than in his classic films. These fights still seem very orchestrated. I have no doubts that if Chan got into a real fight he would probably still give a very good account of himself, but I suspect it would look very different from the stylized and contrived fights he has in his films. These are choreographed to show off his natural grace.
Daniel Mindel's cinematography is frequently quite good, though many of his effects are overly familiar. When bullets shot through a wall each gave rise to a column of light in BLOOD SIMPLE, it was an impressive effect. Now it is over-used and once again here we see it used. He does get some nice Nevada landscapes and it is hard not to make the Forbidden City in Beijing look impressive. Oh, and yes, I can confirm what Jackie Chan fans already know. The viewer should sit through the credits to see the out-takes from the filming.
Overall SHANGHAI NOON this is just a passable entertainment which gets from me a rating of 5 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 2000 Mark R. Leeper
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