image courtesy of IMDB
Rating:
5
AKA: Highbinders
Year of release: 2003
Company: Media Asia, Columbia
Genre: action/comedy
Running time: 90 min.
Director: Gordon Chan
Action director: Sammo Hung
Script: Bey Logan, Gordon Chan, Alfred Cheung, Bennett Davlin, Paul Wheeler
Producers: Jackie Chan, Willie Chan, Alfred Cheung, Tim Kwok, Candy Leung
Cinematography: Arthur Wong
Editor: Chan Ki-Hop
Stars: Jackie Chan, Claire Forlani, Lee Evans, Julian Sands, John Rhys-Davies, Anthony Wong, Christy Chung, Nicholas Tse, Edison Chen, Alfred Cheung
Rated PG-13 for mild violence and language
Related links:
Jackie Chan biography
Anthony Wong biography
Movie Review index
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The Medallion
Jackie Chan. Image courtesy of IMDB.
Jackie Chan fans have been awaiting a return to greatness for the action star for some time now, and it looked as if The Medallion (called Highbinders during production) might be it. Gordon Chan, the director of such solid action movies as 2000 A.D. was to be at the helm, and the legendary Sammo Hung (Jackie's classmate at opera school and a major star in his own right) would be handling the action co-ordination. Combined with the largest budget ever for a Hong Kong production (US$41 million), The Medallion couldn't miss, right?
Disappointingly, it does. Like many of Jackie Chan's recent productions, it really doesn't feel like a "Jackie Chan movie". The plot has Jackie as a Hong Kong cop who is helping Interpol investigate a smuggler (Julian Sands) who is after a mystical artifact which gives the wearer immortality. After Jackie is killed while trying to save the young priest in charge of protecting the medallion, he comes back to life with supernatural powers, which he uses to stop Sands from getting the powers for himself.
Julian Sands. Image courtesy of IMDB.
The Medallion does start well, with a couple of good fight/stunt sequences which show that Jackie still has it, at least in small doses. However, once he gets the magical powers, The Medallion degenerates into a CGI mish-mash. For many of the movie's action bits, Jackie is either doubled or tweaked with computer trickery. It's still somewhat entertaining, but it's nowhere close to being as exciting as Chan's classic movies. You literally could have inserted in any "action star" (whatever Hollywood considers that to be nowadays) and gotten the same results.
The script (which, for some reason, it took five people to come up with) doesn't even keep Jackie and the action in the forefront. There's way too much time devoted to the lame "comedy" of Lee Evans (who plays an Interpol agent assigned to help Jackie) or the inconcievable romance between Jackie and Claire Forlani (who plays, you guessed it, an agent who has had a past with Jackie). Supposedly, the film was cut by about twenty minutes prior to release, but I highly doubt that any amount of footage could have helped matters out unless it involved Jackie taking out Ken Lo ala the finale of Drunken Master II.
Lee Evans. Image courtesy of IMDB.
For how much time is used up in throwaway scenes, we don't even get a good villain. Julian Sands comes off as generic, and Anthony Wong (who plays Sands' henchman) is wasted in a role that doesn't allow him to do anything except look silly in a bowler hat. Even the musical score isn't that great here, seemingly having been pulled from a stock library, rather than specifically crafted for the movie itself -- and what the hell is an Avril Lavigne song doing on the soundtrack? Is Jackie's target audience now 14-year-old girls?
Still, even a below-average Jackie Chan movie is better than a lot of stuff that comes out, especially during this summer, which has been horrible for action films. The action is decent, some of the jokes are funny, and Claire Forlani and Christy Chung (who plays Lee Evans' wife -- yeah, right) provide some nice eye candy. But as long as Jackie keeps watering down his name with middle-of-the-road efforts like this and The Tuxedo, I believe his movies are going to suffer down the road. And if the film's dismal opening weekend (US$8 million) is any indication, it looks like Chan's wallet will as well. Let's hope Chan can get back on the horse soon, so we won't be subjected to Rush Hour 5: Rushin' for Social Security.
