Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career is a little bit sad really, just when he started to make it big he stopped being able to do all the things that made him good in the first place. This does not mean that he does not still have great comic timing, but it does mean that he seems to be involving himself in some real lowest common denominator tosh. Hot on the heels of the pretty poor Tuxedo comes The Medallion (nee the Highbinders) where Jackie tries to work out the formula to his American hits and replicate it. The formula seems to be Team-Up With A Comedian. The failure here is that the comedian he teams up with is Lee Evans.
Don’t get me wrong, Lee Evans can be very funny. But there isn’t a single gag that works in this supernatural powered, poor special effects effort. The idea of pairing two gifted physical comedians drops the moment that we realise that Evans has been hired to do some sub Norman Wisdom schtick. Suffice to say the plot makes no sense, the characters make no sense and – even for £1.60 at an EasyCinema – we felt robbed.
Note to scriptwriterss (and comic writers since they suffer from the same disease). Merely pointing out an inconsistency in your plot, does not make it go away. Here when Jackie Chan is resurrected he comes back naked. Yet the other characters come back fully clothed. When Evans’s character points this out this is supposed to funny (and a bit smutty because he wants to see Claire Forlani in the nuddy). It just illustrates how bad the movie is.
By the way, Claire Forlani = Box Office Poison. Yes?