Bleeding Steel (Jackie Chan)

[Aclea]

Didn't see a thread for this - not exactly surprising - but if there is one, mods feel free to merge.



I must admit, part of me was rather looking forward to giving Jackie Chan’s much ridiculed Bleeding Steel the writes-itself two-word review Bleeding Awful, especially considering it skipped Bluray for a bargain basement priced DVD-only release in the UK, but in reality it has to be said that Chan has made much worse (The Tuxedo and Dragon Blade spring to mind). He may not have made weirder than this sci-fi thriller, though, that sees his cop facing off against an immortal bio-engineered Voldemort who cruises over Australia in a spacecraft determined to get Chan’s daughter’s mechanical heart because it’s pumping flashbacks of all the memories and medical records of the mad scientist who created him into her blood. Did I mention the witch and the dwarf who are selling her therapy session tapes to a hack novelist, the transvestite, the Johnny Depp Mad Hatteralike stage magician-cum-spirit guide, the black-clad helmeted stormtroopers with pulse guns that no-one gives a second look to in the streets of Sydney, the frequently terrible acting in two languages (pride of place going to Anna Cheney's overexcited amateurish Aussie TV interviewer who delivers her risible dialogue as if it was the most exciting thing to ever happen to anyone ever in the history of everything), the truly indecipherable array of unidentifiable accents of indeterminate origin from the Australian actors or the bad tempered tall slim high-kicking leather-clad fashion model with the deadly fidget spinner who turns into a burly male stuntman in a fight on the top of Sydney Opera House that recalls the skyscraper fight in Who Am I? Not that she’s the only obvious example of doubling, with Chan spending most of his second big fight behind a mask and Erica Xia-hou (who co-wrote the film) constantly changing from a stuntman to a woman whenever she has a particularly elaborate bit of physical action or wirework in the finale.

It plays like something a stoned internet nerd has convinced himself is the greatest script ever written by combining lots of kewl ideas from their favourite movies and video games that don’t really fit together, making it a curious mixture of predictable plot developments in predictable scenes with predictable direlogue thrown together so haphazardly that you can’t predict what oddity it’ll throw up next. Logic or exposition barely comes into it. Why does the now Borg-alike Voldemort have a spaceship full of scientists and stormtroopers that nobody notices? Because if he didn’t, Jackie couldn’t fight him in it while it explodes, Winter Soldier-style, around them. Why does Jackie’s arm get cut off? Because it couldn’t grow back if it didn’t, stoopid. How does Show Lo escape from being chained to an exercise machine in the basement after dropping the key when Jackie blows up his house? Who cares as long as he can unexpectedly appear ahead of Jackie to throw eggs at a car he’s chasing and cause it to spectacularly crash. Why does Tina Haubrich kill one of her own men for no reason? Presumably because acting like a sneering cartoon lesbian stereotype beating the crap out of everyone because it’s that time of the month isn’t enough to establish her evil credentials, but the film’s well past needing a reason by then.

Yet despite the resounding raspberries the film was met with it’s more than competently made, has a good use of locations and if the action scenes are a long way from Chan’s prime they’re respectable enough. It’s one of those films where you just have to be in an easygoing mood and go with the flow. In no sense of the word is this a good film, nor is it one that’s so bad it’s good, and yet it’s never boring and there is fun to be had with the whole gonzo throw-it-all-in-the-mix haphazardness. It’s never as joyfully unsane as the likes of Lifeforce, it’s completely inessential viewing and a big step back from the quality of Chan’s preceding film The Foreigner or even Kung Fu Yoga, and yet…

Lionsgate’s Region A-locked 2D Bluray (the film was converted to IMAX 3D in China) is mostly a decent affair with strong definition but moments of occasional jerkiness that a few of Chan’s recent releases have suffered from: it’s never as bad as Kung Fu Yoga’s transfer but there are just enough moments, usually in the car chases, to niggle. Offering the original Mandarin/English hybrid soundtrack (amusingly changing Li Sun to Leeson in the subtitles) and a pretty badly mixed English-only dub, as has so often been the case in the past for Chan films released by bigger studios the original outtakes (admittedly none of much interest and interspersed with behind the scenes footage) and Chan’s semi-obligatory end title song have been dropped in favour of a simple end credits scrawl. The only extra is the US trailer and trailers for assorted no-hoper low budget straight-to-VOD Lionsgate titles.

[fatboy1111]

Pretty good movie