Mr. Nice Guy

By Jove, the old boy's holding up pretty well. Sure, Jackie Chan at 44 has lost a bit of the startling arachnid agility he flashed 20 years ago in Drunken Master and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, but not all that much. For contrast, check out the lush corpulence of director Sammo Hung in his cameo role. A former kung fu badass of Chan's generation, Hung now seems to have defected to the George Foreman temple of martial arts discipline. But give Hung credit for this: He understands better than most of Chan's recent directors what audiences really want from the Hong Kong megastar's films. So to a much greater degree than Rumble in the Bronx, First Strike, and Once a Cop, the fight scenes in Mr. Nice Guy are all about Jackie and his innovative, ever-evolving kung fu style, not ensemble brawls in which he shares the glory and workload with hosts of younger protégés. I would assume that, by this point, everyone with violent objections to the encroachment of aggressive cuteness and whimsy into Chan's films -- a trend that's been underway for almost two decades now -- is already off the Jackie bandwagon. For everyone else whose interest in this genre didn't vanish after its brief eruption of mid-Nineties trendiness, there's as much good, frenetic fun to be had in Mr. Nice Guy as any action-comedy you're likely to see this year. Even after all the redundant praise Chan has drawn for infusing martial arts cinema with elements of slapstick, screwball comedy and Vincente Minnelli-style production design (check a late chase scene in which Chan and his pursuers pop in and out of a maze lined with bright blue doors), it's still a marvel to watch him do his thing. I won't waste space with a story summary. Let it suffice to say it's the kind of deal where bad guys commit scores of public assaults and murders in pursuit of a videotape that could finger them as criminals. (Tell a Jackie Chan fan his plots are a joke and the reply you'll get is, “Yes. And your point would be…?”) Like countless Golden Harvest action movies before it, Mr. Nice Guy hews to a pat formula of amateurish first-take acting, cheapo special effects, Access TV-caliber film editing, and drop-dead brilliant fight sequences. This unevenness is always a bit grating. You wish Chan wasn't quite so content with fulfilling his audience's lowered expectations. Still, for all their technical shortcomings, his movies never fail to send me home with a big, sloppy idiot grin on my face and a fresh charge of endorphins lighting up my cerebral cortex. For me, that virtue alone will always be good for a quarter's worth of stars.