This mainland Chinese super production is the 100th movie for Jackie Chan, but there’s not much here to celebrate. With its lugubrious and confusing storytelling and glacial pace, it’s a long, long way from the explosive energy of, say, a more 'traditional’ Jackie Chan picture. Deft, skillful, and fun, the star, famed for his fearless physicality and charisma, doesn’t actually get to do much in this part-pageant, part-history lesson, except get his fingers blown off and spout lines that, even allowing for poor translation, seem banal beyond belief.
Chan plays a Chinese national hero – military commander Huang Xing – who in life, lay siege with a tiny force in a famous contest in 1908 against the troops who fought in support of China’s ruling elite, the Qing Dynasty. A key figure in the 1911 republican revolution, historians claim Huang as a brilliant mind, superb soldier and sublime leader. Chan plays him in an unsmiling, furrowed brow kind of way; he’s so stiff and insecure at times, you feel like he’s become like some kind of virtual hand puppet. Late in the movie, we see him fight some 'bad guys’; it’s so surprising and out of character for the part, I felt like, for at least thirty seconds, I was in a martial arts movie. This tremulous feeling was soon swept aside once Chan started 'commanding’ his revolutionaries, which consists of pointing and speaking loudly.
Chan co-directed the film with Zhang Li and they seem to have by-passed any sense of human drama in attempting to cover the final surge – personal, political, cultural and spiritual – that led to the end of an era in China and the beginning of another. And if the 'talk’ scenes are silly and flatly played, the battle scenes are
staged with an epic scope but absolutely no suspense, interest or
tension.
The film boils the revolution down to two elements: Huang’s military scores (and struggles), and the diplomat efforts of the man who was to become China’s first president, Sun Yat Sen (Winston Chao). He comes off slightly better than Chan, which is to say he’s much less like a hand-puppet, but then he’s more like an actor who looks lost; for a lot of the film he has that somewhat vacant attitude of a performer uncertain of his lines (and the intention behind them). Although, he does play at least one beat here with a bit of verve. It’s a scene where Sun is meeting with European representatives and he makes a plea for dollars (at least that’s what I thought was happening). Frustrated by the gathering’s smug indifference (and each and every one of the Europeans are depicted as total goofballs, some of them with very funny hair and moustaches), Sun elects to abandon all sense of, um, diplomacy, and starts to use a leg of lamb to explain how each nation state is exploiting China in the way it carves up its riches. It’s a crude bit of irony, true, and certainly simplistic, but at least it’s fun – and there’s not much sheer filmmaking pleasure to be had here, though some may find camp value in Joan Chen’s sneering portrait of the Empress Dowager.
Since this film was commissioned by the Chinese to celebrate the centenary of the revolution there’s been a lot of glum speculation by critics and commentaries in the last few weeks that the film’s pushy, stolid feel is to be blamed on faceless bureaucrats 'directing’ the film’s content (and ensuing its propaganda value). Of course, such considerations are swept away when the movie turns out to be better than this one"¦ Still, I wonder whose idea it was to tattoo the film with countless surtitles explaining bits of action and characters? It’s like watching a museum piece but without the intellect. At least in the best museums the exhibits can inspire and take the imagination into a very special place.
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