Mr. Nice Guy

Bomb Rating: 

"Then he kicks ass. The end."

Jackie Chan is a worldwide superstar, so why can't he hire some people whose native language is human to write his scripts? This movie was filmed in English (in Melbourne), yet the dialogue is so stilted and mistimed that I found myself watching the actors' mouths, convinced that their speech was dubbed nonetheless.

Of course, Jackie Chan movies are just about the stunts anyway, right? Whatever, but how hard is it to throw in a decent story, if just to appease those viewers with a functioning brain who might have stumbled into the theater accidentally? Call me crazy, but I'll bet there's a writer out there somewhere who can do better than "Jackie plays a cook who walks into the wrong alley and has to fight for his life because he's suddenly in the middle of some gangster chase. Then he kicks ass. The end."

If Jackie Chan is capable of bouncing up walls like an orangutan and kung fu fighting with ladders, table saws, paint equipment, tables and chairs, surely he must be capable of what would apparently amount to his most difficult stunt to date -- playing a character who exists in more than two dimensions. Lacking that, maybe Jackie should give up this whole movie thing and come out with a sixty-minute tape for $19.95 featuring a whole bunch of fight sequences edited together -- since that's all his movies amount to anyway.