Renny Harlin is one of Finland's most popular directors, known in the past for his exciting action and adventure films such as “Die Hard 2” and “Deep Blue Sea”. He is trying out a comedy thriller, Skiptrace. However, he has one of the most famous and talented Hong Kong superstars of all time as his backbone. Did he get the most out of him or did he waste him like most filmmakers of late? Read on to find out more.
Jackie Chan plays a Hong Kong police officer. Together with an American player, he fights against a Chinese mafia gang. Jackie Chan has had success in the past with similar cross-cultural tag team buddy films such as the Rush Hour series and Shanghai Noon. Now he has another new partner in Johnny Knoxville.
Skiptrace is a child's game that has a slow structure. There are too many loose ends in the plot. The focus is on the comedy and not the script. Even the comedies don't work in most cases. It's nothing more than a rehash of some of Jackie Chan's past action films and has absolutely nothing new to offer. Who cares about history when Jackie Chan is in action? If you are one of those people who feel this way, you might even experience disappointment as the stunts don't happen at regular intervals and it feels like the choreography could have been better.
The film begins with an interesting fight sequence and like most Jackie Chan films, he fails at the beginning and only wins at the end. You could predict what's going to happen and the audience is always ahead of the movie.
Johnny Knoxville is one of the better partners Jackie has gotten recently. He doesn't annoy you. But since the script is so loosely structured and you always know what he's going to do, he doesn't inspire you either. Jackie meets him for a flimsy reason and they had to travel together for God knows why, even though Jackie has many other ways to solve his problems. Like most dual hero comedy films, they don't get along well in the beginning, then turn into one of the big friends, then break up due to a disagreement, only to team up again in the climax to fight the villain. That's how it's been done all these years and you can find all these stereotypes at Skiptrace too.
Chi-Ying Chan's camera work is very good, but he was not sufficiently supported by the visual effects team. The CGI looks very bad, especially in some critical moments where it was needed most.
Overall, Skiptrace is another film that fails to utilize Chan's full range of abilities. A rushed project that should have been done better.
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