Shanghai Noon is less enervating than its trailer would lead you to believe--but not by much. It will be forgotten moments after the outtakes montage that plays beneath the end credits, replaced by musty memories of such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Frisco Kid, Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, even Wilson's own Bottle Rocket, which he co-wrote and starred in. Shanghai Noon is like the mobster in the witness relocation program: It has no identity of its own. Such, of course, are the complaints that can be made about any Jackie Chan film made for and released in the States: They're pale imitations of his best films (Police Story, Project A) or imitations of someone else's best films (1991's Operation Condor was a nifty redo of Raiders of the Lost Ark), built upon a foundation of golly-whiz stunts Chan's been doing since his audience was still learning to crawl. Shanghai Noon, a compendium of borrowed kicks and pilfered plots, is no different.
To sum up this film's plot is to recount no less than a dozen other Jackie Chan films, none more so than 1998's Rush Hour; indeed, it's likely Shanghai Noon was written in the same Word document--though "written" is perhaps too strong a word when "cut and paste" will do. Once more, with feeling, Chan must travel from China to the United States to rescue a kidnapped female, and he must do so with the reluctant assistance of a wise-ass American. The variations on the theme--in this go-around, the girl is a princess (Ally McBeal's Lucy Liu), and his partner is a white cowboy instead of a black cop--are nearly beside the point. An urban setting, the Far East, or the Wild, Wild West--locale (and language, for that matter) is rendered moot when Chan unpacks his bags and spoils for a fight.
Chan's character, an Imperial Guard named Chon Wang, leaves The Forbidden City and arrives in the dusty armpit of Nevada in search of the purloined Princess Pei Pei (Liu, reduced to the background almost immediately); he stumbles across a train robbery being conducted by Roy O'Bannon (Wilson) and his ragtag gang of miscreants and misfits. Roy's a likeable rogue, refusing to steal from pretty women; the guy is a giant grin, all teeth and bullshit. But the robbery goes awry--Roy's an awful crook--and Roy and Chon wind up deserted in the desert; Roy, quite literally, is up to his neck in the middle of nowhere. It's a nifty way of getting him out of the movie for a long stretch, leaving Chon free to roam the reservation--where he picks up a peace pipe and, after a stoned one-night fling, gets hitched to a character billed only as Indian Wife (Brandon Merrill), who also appears and re-appears throughout the film like a shadow...or a screenwriter's afterthought.
By the time Roy and Chon meet up again in a bar fight, the film takes it sweet time crawling toward the inevitable climax; they discover the princess, working on the railroad, during the third hour (or thereabouts--maybe it just seems like it). For a film that prides itself on being a brisk good time, it bogs down in cinematic quicksand: A montage (set to inexplicable modern-day music by the likes of ZZ Top and Aerosmith) gives way to a fight scene gives way to a montage gives way to a fight...and on and on, until the repetition grows wearying, numbing. Worse, director Tom Dey and his screenwriters (Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, previously responsible for the arid Lethal Weapon 4) can't decide whether they've made parody or tribute, so they split the difference--which amounts to nothing more than tepid, smug rip-off. It has neither the guts to play it as all-out farce nor the smarts for paying homage; imagine the horrific spawn created by breeding Blazing Saddles with Silverado.
By all rights, this film belongs to Wilson--and not just because he's already written some of it. Wilson, who looks like a cross between a young Dennis Hopper and a pre-wreck Montgomery Clift, has had a most inexplicable career post-Bottle Rocket. He's not a star; he's a statistic, winding up beaten (The Cable Guy) or dead (Armageddon, Anaconda, The Haunting) in most of the films in which he's appeared. Save for The Minus Man, a lugubrious anti-thriller in which Wilson plays a drifter who kills with kindness (he offers his victims a tasty, non-violent poison), he's appeared in films so far beneath him that he needs a parachute to reach the set.
Brother and Bottle Rocket co-star Luke has fared no better, but his bad luck can be blamed on his good looks: Luke, hiding behind blank brown eyes, is easy to underestimate. Owen, on the other hand, possesses a far deeper, darker talent; his aw-dude exterior hints at a stormy interior, a sort of calm brutality within. Hampton Fancher, The Minus Man's writer-director, exploited it; in that film, Wilson exudes a cool seethe, until even his shrugs seem to contain a hidden cruelty. Tom Dey, a first-time director more concerned with stunts and speech coaches, has little interest in such bothersome things as characterization and nuance.
Shanghai Noon's Roy bears more than a passing resemblance to Bottle Rocket's Dignan: Both men dream of being outlaws, when in truth they can't even load a gun. Roy's such a mess, even the villainous Marshall Van Cleef (Xander Berkeley) can't believe he's chasing this guy. "How do you survive out here?" wonders Van Cleef--whose name pays homage to Leone heavy Lee Van Cleef. Roy's delighted when he finds his name and picture on a most-wanted poster, though he's disappointed to find that Chon's worth more--and has a nifty nickname, Shanghai Kid, to boot. Like Dignan, Roy wants to be immortal; he echoes a line from Bottle Rocket when he insists Chon go ahead, leaving him to face off against his old gang. "They can't touch me," he drawls, rewriting the touching, funny climax from Bottle Rocket. Roy imagines himself some figure in a history book; the punch line, revealed in the film's final scene, is that he is. Wilson's laconic energy keeps the film moving; he's breezy enough to carry this tissue paper till the very end.
Chan, on the other hand, is the closer who's lost five miles an hour off his fastball; it's not enough to render him expendable, but it's just enough to make him vulnerable. The 46-year-old looks as though he's moving in slow motion--which is even played for gags in one scene, in which he throws tomahawks at two Native-American baddies, who snatch them from the wind and hurl them right back. And in the post-Matrix era, his feats seem somehow tame, even cute--holdovers from a simpler era, when a man didn't need wires and stop-action, digitized tricks to prove his merit. What's dazzling about Jackie Chan is that he can still move at all.
