Every day I'm more and more convinced I could write a movie screenplay. Especially after last night's viewing of the new Jackie Chan movie The Medallion, which was the work of 5, count 'em 5 screenwriters.

First a bit of background on the movie. It was made in Hong Kong for $35 million, which is supposedly a huge huge budget for movies there. The goal was to produce a movie in Hong Kong that would also do well in America, and their solution was to make a film more along the lines of Jackie Chans wildly-successful-in-Asia Asian films but also pair him with a comic foil, a formula that has done well in America.

But you know what they say about the best laid plans...

This movie was like a train wreck, in that it was so horribly bad that I couldn't keep my eyes off of it. First of all, the 5 screenwriters thing? Not a good idea. Characters pop in and out of the movie with no explanation, plot points are introduced then promptly forgotten, and seemingly important parts of the back story are never explained.

In one typical scene, Female Sidekick (played adequately by Claire Forlani of Mallrats and Antitrust) is fighting with a whole bunch of bad guys when all of a sudden everything stops and this other woman, previously unseen in the film, appears and assumes a stereotypical "karate stance". The two start fighting (with odd sound effects of cats screeching in the background to signify a "cat fight"), Female Sidekick wins, and Random Other Chick disappears from the movie with no explanation.

The movie also plays it fast and loose with its own mythology. From what I could gather, the idea was that when the two pieces of this medallion were joined by Random Young Asian Boy it had the power to grant eternal life and superhuman powers, but the separate pieces had no such powers. Indeed, Jackie Chain is granted these powers by the medallion, but later the boy also gives the bad guy super powers with only half the medallion (why? nobody knows.), then tells him that he can only be immortal if he gets the other half. After getting it, Jackie uses the other half to kill him. Confused? So was I. Why didn't the boy just use his half to kill him? Why did the boy give him super powers in the first place? Nothing about this movie made much sense.

And to top it all off, half of the movie was dubbed, and the "special effects" consisted of "increase the film speed". Combined, these were very distracting, as I spent half the movie trying to figure out what language it was filmed in, which characters were dubbed and which weren't, and the other half of the movie trying not to get a seizure.

If you're in the mood for a movie with awkwardly bad acting, strange special effects, and a plot that makes no sense, then I highly recommend The Medallion. I give it one star because Jackie Chan is cool, and one star for being by far the strangest thing I have seen on screen all year.

Posted by: Eileen at August 24, 2003 11:15 AM