Reviews

Another action comedy; another hollywood-grafts-a-story-onto-a-kung-fu script. Even so, it's a *Jackie Chan* action comedy, and so it works! Owen Wilson is a little off-putting as the outlaw-spouting-psychobabble at first, but once you get used to him it's actually quite amusing. Nobody does action-comedy like Jackie Chan, unlike in "Rush Hour", Hollywood has finally figured out that the best thing to do for JC is to just get out of his way and let him entertain. Good work all around.

I wanted to like this movie, and I did - for a while. Bruce Willis plays the title character (whose name comes from a song Willis was working on -- indeed the whole movie grew out of it; you hear it in the ending credits) with the same dry slapstick style he perfected on "Moonlighting". But I can tell you the very instant the movie goes bad -- the first appearance of the Mayflowers. I really think that their parts (and the braindead story around them) must have been written by somebody other than whoever wrote the other parts of the movie. The whole Mayflower plotline (and the horrifc acting by Grant and particularly Bernhart) positively reeks. If you can somehow get someone to record the movie and remove all their parts (which includes the climactic battle, but who cares?), you will actually enjoy this flick. If you have to sit through the Mayflowers, you lose (I did, and I'm doing you a favor by warning you.)

Willis plays the title guy, a here-to-fore unknown seminal influence on rock history. Played quiet, with 'interviews' and 'archival footage' of Bruno's brushes with the greats and greatness, it's done quite well. The "documentary" finishes up with a real concert with Bruce backed up by a kick-ass blues band doing various "Bruno" songs and some standards that even wound up being released as a CD (still available as I write this). Their version of "Secret Agent Man" is particularly recommended.

Yul Brynner plays the cheerfully lawless rogue "Catlow", perpetually on the run from lawman and friend "Ben" (Richard Crenna) and malevolent bounty hunter "Miller" (Leonard Nemoy - in one of his early post-Star Trek roles). Great music, obviously 'influenced' by the soundtrack to "The Magnificent Seven", and an over-the-top plot involving stealing mexican gold stolen from the confederacy, Apaches, alternatively willing and vengeful women, banditos, and enough captures and escapes for several movies. Lightweight fun (in that lightheartedly violent way of late-1960's/early 1970's movies, in which any character whose name we didn't know was liable to receive instant death from the hero or villain -- a characteristic, of course, of many action movies to this day), with just enough actual danger (from the Apaches and Miller) to keep it interesting.

Jackie Chan is a stunt genius. In this movie he fights on stilts, skis, underwater, in high-rises, and more. As usual, he gets the bejeebers beat out of him, but still triumphs. In this movie, he is involved in a James-Bondish plot of stolen nuclear weapons (and, of course, he even *says* he's like James Bond, just in case you didn't get it.) But who cares? The stunts are fantastic as always, at the same time funny and breathtaking. There is nobody like Jackie Chan.