The most breathtaking cinematic vision of the year comes from an unexpected source, arriving right in the middle of Jackie Chan's latest action film, Skiptrace. Like all unforeseeable miracles, it is dreamlike and impossible to recreate even if you tried, although several professional minds obviously came together to create the sights and sounds of 2016: Jackie Chan and an entire Mongolian village at night Sitting around campfires in the great Eurasian steppes, it begins with a rousing rendition of Adele's “Rolling in the Deep” – complete with musical accompaniment on traditional instruments (for added authenticity).
Listen closely and you can even hear a bit of Tuvan throat singing in this cover by the Adele group, one of many cultural references that idiosyncratically accompany the relentless onslaught of pranks and bullshit jokes that also comprise 107 minutes of the Asia-set English-language Chan vehicle fills. 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 viewer's treasure. When else can sometimes-pop star Chan show off his singing skills?
Chan isn't here because of your skepticism either. “Rolling in the Deep,” he assures a bewildered Knoxville as they huddle together in an enclave of yurts, “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 that stars the 62-year-old Chan with Johnny Knoxville as a cop and fraudsters standing in their way across Asia. The concept and colorful location photography probably sounded like catnip to Chan's fanbase (and financiers). They were right: Chinese ticket buyers flocked last month to make the film a $60 million No. 1 opening hit, and since then the film has a reported 133 so far in an otherwise sluggish theatrical season in the coveted Chinese market grossed millions of US dollars.
I wouldn't dare say it was Adele who sealed the deal for 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 exist to build a conspiracy about a crime in Hong Kong on which the The rest of the series is based on the crazy machinations of the film. But that's what earned it a place in my heart – that and the gaping gap left between a disappointing summer and the upcoming Oscar season in a slow year for great films. That and the love that Chan's character Bennie Chan has for alpacas – another seemingly random quirk so specific that it must originate somewhere deep within the man himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtjkcaBWz98
There's an endearingly goofy silliness to the antics that Chan and Knoxville engage in in “Skiptrace,” beginning with Chan being tortured years ago by the death of his partner 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 sees several houses on stilts collapse like dominoes as Chan fights his way through a dozen nameless villains I wear sensible dad shoes. Skiptrace is a film that finds wonderful PG-13 humor in making Johnny Knoxville eat goat testicles, get punched repeatedly in the groin, and roll around the streets of Russia in a dirty garbage can. It's a film in which Knoxville, who has evaded death several times over Jackass, silently begs us to buy him as a fast-talking American con man while he delivers rude lines like, “I didn't think you could get pregnant like that.” ” we made it!”
But there's an admirably intentional weirdness to these details, like how the aforementioned dumpster is shot through the windows of a neighboring factory to transport Skiptrace from one action scene to the next. Random coincidences only exist in this universe to give the characters an interesting place to stay, such as at a local Chinese mud festival where they can engage in a mud fight with villains, or at the aforementioned Siberian factory so that Chan and Knoxville can use the slides and can use the conveyor belt of your shooting location for maximum benefit. What kind of factory is this, you ask? A Russian nesting doll factory, because of course it is, and also because that gives Jackie Chan a reason to use a doll as an ever-tinier makeshift weapon against former WWE diva Eve Torres.
This is Skiptrace's boldest conceit: that every cliche, every gag, and every set-up has a purpose, and that purpose is to fulfill the conditions of its own convenience, to serve first a punchline and then a plot. And yet actual thoughts creep into your brain. As it whizzes through the dizzying array of locations in hilarious brevity, Skiptrace leaves you appreciating Greater Asia and marveling at how the burgeoning ticket-buying populations of Russia and China are geographically connected. As you watch Chan and Knoxville frantically blow up hollowed-out pig carcasses with their mouths so they can float down a river on a raft constructed from them, you might appreciate the raw natural beauty of the continent and its flora and fauna and ingenuity knowledge of the ancient Chinese who did the same.
“Skiptrace” is reminiscent of Chan's previous hit-or-miss American buddy comedies – crowd-pleasing cross-cultural Hollywood films like “Shanghai Noon,” “Shanghai Knights” and “Rush Hours 1, 2 and 3” that established a profitable subgenre within Chan's own filmography. These English-language films helped Chan solidify his crossover superstar status beyond the Hong Kong martial arts classics that made him an acrobatic favorite in the U.S., and paid off more than the weaker action comedies that linked him to Hollywood Love interests brought together – or with Steve Coogan. But even as he continues to make all sorts of films at home and in Hollywood, he finds it difficult to truly define what the final decade of the Jackie Chan brand looks like.
For example, Chan gave Jaden Smith a good drama lesson in kung fu in the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, but in a silly film like Skiptrace he feels completely at home and completely himself, despite the awkwardness Implementation and the film's nerve-wracking youthfulness certainly captures Harlin in an elaborately staged fight sequence on a cargo ship that seems like a spiritual allusion to the Titanic or perhaps Deep Blue Sea amusing action with the sprightly Chan. It's not a good film by any means, but in the film's comedic moments it captures the Chan we've come to love off stage, in interviews and in life.
So does it matter that “Skiptrace” is a messy mess, crude and occasionally offensive, and unlikely to be seen in the U.S. when it opens in limited theaters next month? (It's currently available on VOD via DirecTV.) I'd argue not as much as the idea that Jackie Chan loves Adele and alpacas and looks like he's having fun in a vehicle that could please dads like him everywhere . At times, Skiptrace feels like the most Jackie Chan movie Jackie Chan has made, certainly in recent years and possibly ever. Let's let him live his truth and keep rolling in the depths.
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