Chan the Man

On a personal note, it is my birthday month, and I am celebrating by making Ms. Spenser watch a bunch of movies from the queue that she ordinarily would veto. First up,  Bleeding Steel (2017), a recent Jackie Chan movie, with all that entails.

Chan is a police officer in a near future Hong Kong. HIs daughter is in critical condition and he is racing to her side. But a call comes in that an important witness is being threatened, so he abandons his trip to see daughter.

The witness is a scientist, working on an artificial heart and some special blood, which he is testing on himself. The police arrive at the same time as a high-tech army, lead by a weird looking guy that seems to be invulnerable. Chan finally manages to blow him up - and then he gets the text that his daughter has died.

Thirteen years later, in Australia. Jackie is now working in a college food court, keeping watch over a young woman who —SPOILER— later turns out to be his daughter, resurrected with that high-tech stuff. Also watching her is a goofy blonde thief, Show Lo. Along with the bad guy Chan blew up and his army, there’s a sexy female assassin after Jackie’s daughter, and he reluctantly lets Show Lo help out.

Since this is late Chan, he does very few stunts or fights, and you can see stand-ins when he does. He still gets to demonstrate some impressive speed - there just isn’t a lot of it. There are a lot of car chases instead - Audis this time, instead of his usual Mitsubishis. I feel let down, like he sold out. Show Lo, a comedian/boyband singer, is obviously added for youth appeal, and he’s not bad. But he’s not Jackie.

The futuristic plot has a lot of odd twists - the title comes from a novel someone wrote that too closely resembles the actual mechanical heart/special blood thing, and there’s a laptop and so on. But we’ve seen worse and didn’t mind it. I don’t even mind not getting much in the way of fantastic fight scenes. But Jackie didn’t even seem to be doing any choreography. There was nothing intelligent or inventive about the fights or chases.

So the joke was on me. Ms. Spenser slept through this, and I had to watch all the way through.