The year's most sublime, mind-melting cinematic vision comes from an unexpected source, popping up in the middle of Jackie Chan's latest action film, Skiptrace. Like all unpredictable miracles, it's dreamlike and impossible to invent if you tried, although several professional minds have clearly come together to create the sight and sound of 2016: Jackie Chan and an entire Mongolian village sitting around a campfire at night on the great Eurasian steppes, breaking into a rousing rendition of Adele's “Rolling in the Deep” – complete with musical accompaniment on traditional instruments (for added authenticity).
If you listen closely, you can even hear a bit of Tuvan throat singing in this Adele group cover, one of many cultural references that idiosyncratically accompany the relentless onslaught of slapstick and dick jokes that also fill 107 minutes of the Asia-set English-language Chan vehicle. It's a completely unironic, seemingly unintentional reminder that we live in a post-postmodern era of mass entertainment, where one viewer's world-colliding trash heap is another's treasure. When else can occasional pop star Chan showcase his singing talents?
Chan isn't here for your skepticism, either. “Rolling in the Deep,” he assures a bewildered Knoxville as they bond in a yurt enclave, “is a classic.”
On paper, Skiptrace, directed by Renny Harlin from a script by BenDavid Grabinski and Jay Longino, is a buddy comedy road trip adventure series that sees 62-year-old Chan stumbling through Asia with Johnny Knoxville as a cop and con artist. The concept and colorful location shots probably sounded like catnip to Chan's fans (and backers). And they were right: Chinese ticket buyers flocked last month to help the film to a $60 million No. 1 opening, and since then it has grossed $133 million so far during an otherwise sluggish box office season in the coveted Chinese market.
I wouldn't dare say it was Adele that won over Chinese audiences. They probably came for Chan, China's greatest living export, and the cast of other Asian stars (Fan Bingbing, Eric Tsang, Winston Chao, Yeon Jung-hoon), whose characters are there to set up a Hong Kong conspiracy story on which the rest of the film's madcap antics hinge. But that's what earned the film a place in my heart – that and the gaping hole left by a weak year for great films between a disappointing summer and the upcoming Oscar season. That and the love that Chan's character Bennie Chan has for alpacas – another seemingly random quirk so specific it must come from somewhere deep within the man himself.
There's an endearingly silly silliness to the antics Chan and Knoxville get up to in Skiptrace. The film begins with Chan tormented by the death of his partner years ago at the hands of a mysterious criminal known as The Matador. Convinced he knows The Matador's identity, he infiltrates the waterfront hideout of a group of villains and blows his cover, setting off a chain reaction that causes several houses on stilts to collapse like dominoes as Chan, in sensible dad shoes, kicks his way through a dozen nameless villains. Skiptrace is a film that finds delightfully PG-13 humor by having Johnny Knoxville eat goat testicles, get repeatedly punched in the groin, and roll through the streets of Russia in a filthy garbage can. It's a film in which Knoxville, who escaped death several times in Jackass, silently begs us to accept him as a smooth-talking American con man, while uttering rude lines like, “I didn't think you could get pregnant like we did!”
These details, however, are admirably wacky, like how the aforementioned trash can is hurled through the windows of a neighboring factory to catapult Skiptrace from one action scene to the next. Random coincidences exist in this universe purely to give the characters an interesting location, like a local Chinese mud festival so they can have a mud fight with bad guys, or the aforementioned Siberian factory so Chan and Knoxville can make the most of their filming location's chutes and conveyor belts. What kind of factory is this, you ask? A Russian Doll factory, because of course it is, and also because it gives Jackie Chan a reason to use a doll as an ever-tinier improvised weapon against former WWE Diva Eve Torres.
That's Skiptrace's most brazen conceit: that every cliche, every gag, and every scene has a purpose, which is to meet the conditions of its own expediency, to deliver first a punchline and then a plot. And yet you might find actual thoughts creeping into your brain. As Skiptrace whizzes along its dizzying array of locations with hilarious brevity, it makes you appreciate the larger Asian space, and marvel at how the burgeoning ticket-buying populations of Russia and China are geographically connected. Watching Chan and Knoxville desperately inflate hollowed-out pig carcasses with their mouths so they can float down a river on a raft constructed from them lets you appreciate the rugged natural beauty of the continent and its flora and fauna, as well as the ingenuity of the ancient Chinese who did the same.
Skiptrace recalls Chan's earlier, sometimes unsuccessful American buddy comedies – crowd-pleasing, cross-cultural Hollywood productions like Shanghai Noon, Shanghai Knights and Rush Hours 1, 2 and 3 that created a profitable subgenre within Chan's own filmography. These English-language flicks helped Chan cement his status as a crossover superstar beyond the Hong Kong martial arts classics that made him a popular acrobatic star in the U.S., and paid more than the weaker action comedies that paired him with Hollywood love stories – or Steve Coogan. But even as he continues to make all sorts of films at home and in Hollywood, he finds it hard to really define what the final decade of Jackie Chan the brand will look like.
Chan, for example, gave a good acting performance teaching Jaden Smith kung fu in the 2010 Karate Kid remake, but he feels completely at home and himself in a silly movie like Skiptrace. Despite the film's clumsy execution and annoyingly childish streak, Harlin captures some really entertaining action with the snappy Chan in an elaborately staged fight scene on a cargo ship that seems like a spiritual nod to Titanic or perhaps Deep Blue Sea. It's not a good movie by any means, but in the film's comedic moments, it captures the Chan we've come to love offstage, in interviews, and in life.
So does it matter that Skiptrace is a chaotic mess, crude and occasionally offensive, and will likely be barely seen in the U.S. when it opens in select theaters next month? (It's currently available on VOD through DirecTV.) Not as important, I'd say, as the idea of Jackie Chan loving Adele and alpacas and looking like he's having a lot of fun in a vehicle that dads like him around the world could enjoy. At times, Skiptrace feels like the most Jackie Chan-ish movie Jackie Chan has made, certainly in recent years and possibly ever. Let's let him live his truth and keep rolling into the deep end.
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