In the present day, the bronze heads are auctioned for over a million euros each. The main company supplying the bronze heads and other stolen relics is MP Corporation. JC (Jackie Chan), is tasked by MP Corp to find the remaining lost bronze heads, with a promise of a 10 times bonus if he can recover all of them. JC visits a man named Professor Guan, who had created 12 identical replicas for study purposes with his team of researchers, under the pretense that he is a reporter named Martin from National Geographic. When left alone, JC scans the multiple bronze Zodiac animal heads using special gloves so that his secret organisation can replicate an extremely realistic model of them. After scanning, he goes to Paris to find a woman named Coco, recommended by Professor Guan, for more information on the whereabouts of two bronze heads.
JC, along with his partners Simon (Kwon Sang-woo), David, and Bonnie, infiltrate a mansion to find two of the bronze heads. JC manages to decode the password to a top secret vault and finds two bronze heads, a painting called "The Roses", along with many other valuable national treasures thought to be lost inside. JC's cover was soon busted but managed to evade capture with all the valuables, but is spotted by Coco. Having no time to explain himself, he tells Coco to meet him at a boat house while fleeing from the mansion's security. At the boat house, Martin tells Coco that he is working for a secret corporation that is trying to recover all the lost relics for China. The guards from the mansion storm the boat house and try to attack JC. However, the police are called in and arrest all of them. JC, Coco and Simon are cleared of any wrongdoing and are released.
Coco, JC and his team are invited to a castle owned by a lady named Katherine (Laura Weissbecker). Unknown to them, the guards from the mansion continue to tail them out of suspicion. It turns out the captain of the "Indestructible", one of the ships involved in the destruction of the Old Summer Place and taking away the treasures, is Katherine's great-grandfather. This upsets Coco, who confronts Katherine on the issue. JC and his team find many valuable treasures in the castle, including the Bronze head of the Rooster, and hatch a series of plans to ferry them out. JC promises Katherine that he will help her locate her great grandfather's remains.
The next day, they venture out in search of the Indestructible's treasures, located on a seemingly uninhabited island. JC instructs Coco and Katherine to stay behind while his team explore the island. However, Coco and Katherine disobey JC's orders to look for Katherine's great grandfather's corpse on their own. They get entangled among the vines and this forces JC to rescue them. The group accidentally discovers the remains of the Indestructible, several more bronze heads and a large quantity of gold (plus the remains of Katherine's great-grandfather.) As they prepare to leave with all the artifacts, they are confronted by the guards from the mansion. In turn, the island's local inhabitants, a group of pirates, appear and promptly capture all of them. JC and his team fight their way through to escape the island via a log set up with a pulley system, leaving the five guards with the pirates.
Back on the yacht, Coco accidentally discovers the real motive of JC's ventures and confronts him. Subsequently, the log carrying approximately eight tonnes of gold and the corpse of Katherine's great-grandpa sinks due to the heavy weight of the gold and the corpse, and all the log's contents are lost. Nevertheless, JC and his team still get rewarded for recovering some of the lost bronze heads. The group is enraged when they find out that the supposedly-missing dragon bronze head was already at the hands of MP Corp all along, thereby making it impossible to claim the large bonus. Meanwhile, Coco and her fellow students' protests over the sale of the national treasures escalated quickly to grab worldwide attention. As Coco's students try to find out more about MP Corp, three of them, including Coco's younger brother, are captured. Coco approaches JC for help but JC seems nonchalant.
JC contacts MP Corp on the availability of "The Roses" artefact and is allowed into the secret premises. Having toured the entire factory, where almost exact duplicates of the relics are made to be sold as real relics in auctions, JC deduces the location of the captives. He challenges a long time rival who happens to be there as well – the unscrupulous treasure hunter, Vulture, to a fight but it ends in a stalemate. JC bargains with MP Corp to sell "The Roses" painting at a reduced price and secures the release of the three hostages. When MP Corp refuses, JC fights his way to the chamber. During the ensuing fight, a furnace explodes due to a guard's baton rupturing one of the pipes. The explosion destroys most of the facility. JC later settles for the release of the three hostages in exchange for the painting and not paying damages done to the premises.
Meanwhile, the dragon bronze head is expected to fetch the highest price in the auction but no one bids for it due to increasing pressure from activist groups. MP Corp, in a bid to teach these groups a lesson, threatens to throw the relic into an active volcano, calling the mission "Let the Dragon Fly," if no bids are received by 12:00 noon the next day. The deadline passes without a single bid and Vulture leads a group of three sky divers to throw the relic into the volcano. JC intervenes and, in the ensuing air-borne struggle, seemingly dies in order to save the relic from dropping into the volcano. As a mark of respect, Vulture hands over the relic to a sprawling JC. MP Corp's owners are arrested on suspicion of counterfeit relics. JC survives and is seen recovering in a hospital and on good terms with everyone, including Vulture. The movie ends off in JC kissing his wife.
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For his 101st movie, Jackie Chan resurrects his maverick treasure hunter from the Armor of God
series to go in search of Chinese relics, only to discover his edge has
been replaced by a sickening line in self-aggrandising patriotism.
1986's Armor of God and its 1991 sequel Armor of God II: Operation Condor remain to this day two of Jackie Chan's most successful and action-packed films. The combination of Indiana Jones-style antiquities-based heroics with Chan's signature brand of slapstick comedy, coupled with a dizzying array of death-defying stunts, proved incredibly popular the world over. It is no surprise that Chan is keen to reprise the role, as his star has been on the wane for a number of years, but it appears he has left it all too late.
Chinese Zodiac, aka CZ12, opens with a brief historical prologue, narrated by Let The Bullets Fly's Jiang Wen. When British forces invaded China in 1860, they stole a number of prized Chinese antiquities, including the heads of 12 animal statues from Beijing's Summer Palace. Representing the symbols of the Chinese zodiac (Dragon, Snake, Rooster, Monkey etc.), the bronze busts have long been thought lost, until they begin popping up in auction houses around the world and fetching millions of dollars each time.
Wealthy businessman and antiques collector Lawrence Morgan (Oliver Platt) is desperate to get his hands on the last of the remaining heads, and agrees to hire renowned treasure hunter JC (Jackie Chan) for the job, at a price of $1 million for each head retrieved. Posing as a National Geographic photographer, JC heads to Paris, together with his tech team (Kwon Sang Woo, Zhang Linxin, Liao Fan) to meet with Coco (Yao Xingtong), a Mainland Chinese woman working to bring lost antiquities back to China. After successfully robbing a French stately home of two bronze heads, their path crosses that of Duchess Katherine (Laura Weissbecker), whose ancestors were involved in the raid of the Summer Palace and offers her help.
So begins a series of misadventures as this unlikely collection of international art thieves, bumbling aristocrats and indignant Chinese Heritage spokespersons travel to a remote island in search of the remaining heads. There they encounter pirates, hidden gold, and interminable in-fighting as the ultimate fate of the treasure remains in the balance. Sadly, audiences who came searching for epic stunts and comedic martial arts will be left rather disappointed. However, fans of lengthy multilingual bickering about national pride, the plight of displaced antiquities and assuming responsibility for the actions of our forefathers are in for a treat.
Jackie Chan picked up two Guinness World Records last week for his work on Chinese Zodiac: Most Credits in One Movie, together with Most Stunts Performed by a Living Actor for his body of work. As Actor, Writer, Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Composer, Stunt Coordinator and, most bizarrely, Catering Coordinator, to name just some of his roles, there is no getting around the fact that the film is something of a vanity project for Chan. The problem is, at 58 years of age, Chan is well past his prime and simply not capable of taking on everything that he used to, whether that be his once-impressive stunt work or other, simpler duties.
Save for an inventive, yet relatively underwhelming opening sequence in which JC flees a Russian army base in a roller-suit (for which Chan was trained by the suit's inventor Jean-Yves Blondeau), there isn't much signature stunt work from Chan until about 90 minutes into this two hour movie. He hops across rooftops and clambers up and down walls, but nothing we haven't seen before. It is only when JC finally comes face to face with rival treasure hunter Vulture (Moroccan-born Taekwondo champ turned stuntman Alaa Safi) in the final act that Jackie actually fights someone, and even then it's essentially good-natured sparring rather than a battle to the death.
This precedes a lengthy scuffle through a warehouse as Jackie fends off an army of security guards, but more interesting is the scrap going on elsewhere between JC's teammate Bonnie (the deliciously leggy Zhang Lanxin) and Vulture's girl, Katie (Caitlin Dechelle). By this point, however, most viewers will have switched off, driven away by scene after scene of vile pontificating from Coco, which slowly turns JC's character around from being a money-grubbing mercenary to a crusader for the preservation of Chinese Heritage.
It is not the film's message that is bothersome - after all it is hard to argue against returning pillaged national treasures to their rightful owners - but it is the clumsy, confrontational manner in which the film handles it that is likely to rile audiences and bore them to tears. Chinese Zodiac is shot through with such a hypocritical air of arrogant self-importance that it's difficult to focus on the actual message. Most audiences will likely be wondering why they're listening to Yao label the French (not the British?) as thieves, rapists and murderers, while Chan denounces the people's right to protest, instead of watching him throw himself off a mountain or under a bus.
Part of the problem is that almost every actor on screen is working in more than one language, and in some cases being overdubbed by a number of other performers. Pity poor Korean heartthrob Kwon Sang Woo, who is relegated here to just another face in JC's Cantonese-speaking team, and has precious little to do - although does get a bizarre family subplot randomly injected into the film's final act. French television actress Laura Weissbecker is almost unbearable as a dotty young French duchess, who inexplicably comes along for the ride. Forced to speak in English, French and then suddenly Mandarin late on, she has an uphill struggle to be anything put a punch bag for the Chinese cast, and the execrable dialogue her character is given all but scuppers any possibility of her giving a decent performance.
The same can be said for Yao Xingtong, who is there to beat her breast and denounce anybody who doesn't agree that China's interests should come first, and is perfectly happy to demand foreigners take responsibility for deeds committed more than 150 years ago. Likewise, she spouts a combination of Mandarin, French and then insanely-dubbed English when the script demands it, while often contradicting earlier pleas (from her and other cast members) to please explain what is going on as everyone jabbers away in their native tongue.
At the centre of all this is Jackie Chan, a man whose popularity has been steadily in decline over the past decade or so, despite his desperate efforts to be taken seriously. The most obvious observation here is that he shouldn't have taken on so many roles. The cinematography is ugly, and regularly misses moments of action due to bad framing, the score and soundtrack are instantly forgettable, and the direction is lacklustre, rambling and tonally inconsistent. While onscreen, Chan does what Chan has always done and his performance here is easily his strongest contribution to the film. However, despite appearing as the same affable clown that has won him legions of fans over the past 30 years, his writing is what sinks the project beyond any hope of recovery.
While the earlier Armor of God entries set their sights on emulating Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, the gadgetry, team dynamic and even the film's abbreviated moniker CZ12 show that Chan is now clearly targeting the Mission: Impossible franchise. However, while those films, in particular Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol, regularly left audiences breathless with an endless series of spectacular set-pieces, Chan simply cannot compete.
The film ends with a decent sky-diving sequence shot at the Aerodium Latvia vertical wind tunnel, but it's so nonsensically cro-barred into the narrative that it baffles and infuriates rather than delights. The final moments see a number of celebrity cameos included in a desperate attempt to reconcile with the audience, but it is all too late, as Chinese Zodiac disappears beyond redemption long before its final act almost reluctantly offers a glimmer of the Jackie Chan of old. If this is to be Chan's final action role, as he has promised, it proves a sad swan song, but one that is perhaps long overdue. Chinese Zodiac is awful.
1986's Armor of God and its 1991 sequel Armor of God II: Operation Condor remain to this day two of Jackie Chan's most successful and action-packed films. The combination of Indiana Jones-style antiquities-based heroics with Chan's signature brand of slapstick comedy, coupled with a dizzying array of death-defying stunts, proved incredibly popular the world over. It is no surprise that Chan is keen to reprise the role, as his star has been on the wane for a number of years, but it appears he has left it all too late.
Chinese Zodiac, aka CZ12, opens with a brief historical prologue, narrated by Let The Bullets Fly's Jiang Wen. When British forces invaded China in 1860, they stole a number of prized Chinese antiquities, including the heads of 12 animal statues from Beijing's Summer Palace. Representing the symbols of the Chinese zodiac (Dragon, Snake, Rooster, Monkey etc.), the bronze busts have long been thought lost, until they begin popping up in auction houses around the world and fetching millions of dollars each time.
Wealthy businessman and antiques collector Lawrence Morgan (Oliver Platt) is desperate to get his hands on the last of the remaining heads, and agrees to hire renowned treasure hunter JC (Jackie Chan) for the job, at a price of $1 million for each head retrieved. Posing as a National Geographic photographer, JC heads to Paris, together with his tech team (Kwon Sang Woo, Zhang Linxin, Liao Fan) to meet with Coco (Yao Xingtong), a Mainland Chinese woman working to bring lost antiquities back to China. After successfully robbing a French stately home of two bronze heads, their path crosses that of Duchess Katherine (Laura Weissbecker), whose ancestors were involved in the raid of the Summer Palace and offers her help.
So begins a series of misadventures as this unlikely collection of international art thieves, bumbling aristocrats and indignant Chinese Heritage spokespersons travel to a remote island in search of the remaining heads. There they encounter pirates, hidden gold, and interminable in-fighting as the ultimate fate of the treasure remains in the balance. Sadly, audiences who came searching for epic stunts and comedic martial arts will be left rather disappointed. However, fans of lengthy multilingual bickering about national pride, the plight of displaced antiquities and assuming responsibility for the actions of our forefathers are in for a treat.
Jackie Chan picked up two Guinness World Records last week for his work on Chinese Zodiac: Most Credits in One Movie, together with Most Stunts Performed by a Living Actor for his body of work. As Actor, Writer, Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Composer, Stunt Coordinator and, most bizarrely, Catering Coordinator, to name just some of his roles, there is no getting around the fact that the film is something of a vanity project for Chan. The problem is, at 58 years of age, Chan is well past his prime and simply not capable of taking on everything that he used to, whether that be his once-impressive stunt work or other, simpler duties.
Save for an inventive, yet relatively underwhelming opening sequence in which JC flees a Russian army base in a roller-suit (for which Chan was trained by the suit's inventor Jean-Yves Blondeau), there isn't much signature stunt work from Chan until about 90 minutes into this two hour movie. He hops across rooftops and clambers up and down walls, but nothing we haven't seen before. It is only when JC finally comes face to face with rival treasure hunter Vulture (Moroccan-born Taekwondo champ turned stuntman Alaa Safi) in the final act that Jackie actually fights someone, and even then it's essentially good-natured sparring rather than a battle to the death.
This precedes a lengthy scuffle through a warehouse as Jackie fends off an army of security guards, but more interesting is the scrap going on elsewhere between JC's teammate Bonnie (the deliciously leggy Zhang Lanxin) and Vulture's girl, Katie (Caitlin Dechelle). By this point, however, most viewers will have switched off, driven away by scene after scene of vile pontificating from Coco, which slowly turns JC's character around from being a money-grubbing mercenary to a crusader for the preservation of Chinese Heritage.
It is not the film's message that is bothersome - after all it is hard to argue against returning pillaged national treasures to their rightful owners - but it is the clumsy, confrontational manner in which the film handles it that is likely to rile audiences and bore them to tears. Chinese Zodiac is shot through with such a hypocritical air of arrogant self-importance that it's difficult to focus on the actual message. Most audiences will likely be wondering why they're listening to Yao label the French (not the British?) as thieves, rapists and murderers, while Chan denounces the people's right to protest, instead of watching him throw himself off a mountain or under a bus.
Part of the problem is that almost every actor on screen is working in more than one language, and in some cases being overdubbed by a number of other performers. Pity poor Korean heartthrob Kwon Sang Woo, who is relegated here to just another face in JC's Cantonese-speaking team, and has precious little to do - although does get a bizarre family subplot randomly injected into the film's final act. French television actress Laura Weissbecker is almost unbearable as a dotty young French duchess, who inexplicably comes along for the ride. Forced to speak in English, French and then suddenly Mandarin late on, she has an uphill struggle to be anything put a punch bag for the Chinese cast, and the execrable dialogue her character is given all but scuppers any possibility of her giving a decent performance.
The same can be said for Yao Xingtong, who is there to beat her breast and denounce anybody who doesn't agree that China's interests should come first, and is perfectly happy to demand foreigners take responsibility for deeds committed more than 150 years ago. Likewise, she spouts a combination of Mandarin, French and then insanely-dubbed English when the script demands it, while often contradicting earlier pleas (from her and other cast members) to please explain what is going on as everyone jabbers away in their native tongue.
At the centre of all this is Jackie Chan, a man whose popularity has been steadily in decline over the past decade or so, despite his desperate efforts to be taken seriously. The most obvious observation here is that he shouldn't have taken on so many roles. The cinematography is ugly, and regularly misses moments of action due to bad framing, the score and soundtrack are instantly forgettable, and the direction is lacklustre, rambling and tonally inconsistent. While onscreen, Chan does what Chan has always done and his performance here is easily his strongest contribution to the film. However, despite appearing as the same affable clown that has won him legions of fans over the past 30 years, his writing is what sinks the project beyond any hope of recovery.
While the earlier Armor of God entries set their sights on emulating Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, the gadgetry, team dynamic and even the film's abbreviated moniker CZ12 show that Chan is now clearly targeting the Mission: Impossible franchise. However, while those films, in particular Brad Bird's Ghost Protocol, regularly left audiences breathless with an endless series of spectacular set-pieces, Chan simply cannot compete.
The film ends with a decent sky-diving sequence shot at the Aerodium Latvia vertical wind tunnel, but it's so nonsensically cro-barred into the narrative that it baffles and infuriates rather than delights. The final moments see a number of celebrity cameos included in a desperate attempt to reconcile with the audience, but it is all too late, as Chinese Zodiac disappears beyond redemption long before its final act almost reluctantly offers a glimmer of the Jackie Chan of old. If this is to be Chan's final action role, as he has promised, it proves a sad swan song, but one that is perhaps long overdue. Chinese Zodiac is awful.
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