“The Medallion”
Starring Jackie Chan and Claire Forlani
The verdict: A terrible movie that will make you long for the mediocrity of “Shanghai Knights
1/4 Stars
The goofy grin. The catlike grace. The brazen stunts. The broken English. Never to be confused with an “actor,” Jackie Chan is a “movie star.”
You know him; you either love him or don’t. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you see one of his silly action/comedy star vehicles and you either line up outside your local movie theater or you stay at home and save your money. Either way, the aging Chan will still be a superstar tomorrow, churning out fly-by-nights like “Twin Dragons” and “Operation Condor 3” probably well into the year 3000.
Sometimes his celluloid diversions hit; sometimes they miss. Sometimes they go straight to video; sometimes they become instant franchises like the “Rush Hour” series. And now comes his latest cinematic mad-lib “The Medallion,” a kitchen-sink spectacle that, to put it lightly, seems highly unlikely to inspire audiences to root for a sequel.
For what it’s worth, Chan plays Eddie Yang, a sweetheart Hong Kong cop whom the audience knows is the good guy from the opening scene where he feeds take-out to a hungry street cat.
Eddie teams up with a high-strung British Interpol man to observe and protect a mystical “Golden Child” adolescent who is himself the protector of a sacred medallion.
The medallion is endowed with supernatural abilities that any self-respecting megalomaniacal madman would kill for. Well, quicker than you can say “Viva Nepal!,” Snakehead, a villainous dandy complete with nefarious intentions and a bowler-wearing henchman, absconds with the kid and the medallion, leaving Eddie to track them down and kick some bad guy butt to set things right.
Along the way he’ll sneak through creepy sewers in search of an underground temple, fly over the flats of Dublin imbued with the medallion’s magical powers, romp through the Irish countryside with Snakehead in hot pursuit and make chop suey out of a crowded hospital during a fight prompted by the words “nurses don’t wear boots.”
Abrasive underscoring, brushes with death and immortality, partial Jackie Chan nudity and glowsticks ensue as Eddie must save the world, get the girl and get slapped around in the outtake reel before his ninety minute odyssey reaches its overdue conclusion.
Offering a highbrow script analysis of “The Medallion” would be as moot as deconstructing “Debbie Does Dallas” for intrinsic intellectual value. Nobody goes to see a Jackie Chan movie on a pilgrimage for inner truth or emotional enlightenment.
Chan’s stocks in trade have always been physicality, reckless abandon for his own well-being and the all-too-real threat of personal injury.
A Chan film always brings the goods for action seekers even when the script fails to ignite any sparks of its own. Right? Well, not exactly. Things seem to have gone awry in the trusty ol’ film conception laboratory one evening. The five screenwriters responsible for “The Medallion” must have mixed the wrong chemicals together that night, because, shockingly enough, the tried-and-true “Jackie-bumbles-and-leaps-his-merry-way-to-laughs-romance-and-adventure” formula this time yields a result about as much fun as a lengthy visit to the dentist’s office. At least the dentist gives you a free toothbrush on your way out the door.
Not to beat the tooth angle to death but… Jackie Chan is getting a bit long in the tooth, and the filmmakers behind “The Medallion” ease the star’s load by cutting his usual amount of action and stunt work in half and substituting them with visual effects (bad visual effects at that) and wire choreography.
But let’s face it, even if the effects were cutting-edge, Jackie zigzagging around in front of a green-screen just doesn’t provide the same rush as watching him jump from one speeding vehicle to another in real-time without the aid of any digital cleanup. Watching such a fearless cliff-hanger as Chan succumb to the overused trend of wire-fu makes one identify with what Dorothy must have felt when Toto pulled the curtain and revealed that the Wizard of Oz was just a nebbishy little mortal after all.
OK, so the action doesn’t deliver as much as it should, but what about Jackie’s inevitable comedic sidekick? Who’s the rubber-faced zany yukking it up with our hero between the high-kicks this time? Chris Tucker? Owen Wilson? Jennifer Love Hewitt even? No, no, no. “The Medallion” is far too D-grade to attract a co-star of that ilk, so be thankful the filmmakers could muster C-grade funny-man Lee Evans to embarrass himself so valiantly as Chan’s second banana. Evans tirelessly mugs through the film’s worst groaners and wobbliest physical schtick, but his energy always reeks too mightily of fumbling desperation.
As Snakehead, Julian Sands dons the villain’s crimson Mozart robe with relish, sneering and vamping past the point of absurdity in his attempts to harness the medallion’s powers for… what else? World domination!!
This shoddy underachievment is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, yet it is not as incompetent as, oh, say a “Gigli” or a “Dreamcatcher.” Those gangly turkeys deserve serious thought and reflection as to what went wrong and why. They were duds of the nth degree, but they had ambition and imagination behind them. The same cannot be said for “The Medallion,” which aims low and accomplishes even less. It’s too slight to effectively pass the time and not quite bad enough to write home about. It’s just this week’s dumb new action movie starring Jackie Chan, and its makers seem disconcertingly content with that fact. Rarely has it been so easy to long earnestly for the affable mediocrity of “Shanghai Knights.”