Hey folks, Harry here... I was to see THE MEDALLION a couple of days ago... later the same day that I suffered through MASKED AND ANONYMOUS... there's nothing more depressing in life than to see two duds in the same day, THE MEDALLION has had all the tell-tale signs of suckage at every stage of knowledge about the film. Through casting, to test screenings and now... in the week of release, I'm getting TONS of negative reviews of this turkey. Instead... I went out and bought ALL THAT JAZZ, CHORUS LINE, CHICAGO and CABERET on DVD and decided to put on my body glitter lotion and lay shimmering in bed to wonderful musicals whilst I shaved my legs... sigh, I feel so much fresher now. Here's Pyul, who I've designated the review that gets to rip this one to pieces... I just don't feel like dedicating any more bandwidth to this title...
Hey Harry,
Once again you and your crew were absent from yet another abyssmal screening, but since I see you're still licking your wounds from Masked and Autistic I'll cut you some slack. You really didn't miss much.
If there's anything I can say about the Medallion, it's that it took me back, back to the heady early nineties, when I used to frequent an asian video store in my neighborhood and proved to be their only white client. Back to the days when I was sure what I was renting was a bootlegged copy or at best, a PAL transfer of the latest and greatest in Hong Kong cinema. Days when I eagerly awaited the Sequel to Fong Sai Yuk, or couldn't wait to get my hands on the third Police Story (the one where stuntmen had supposedly died in a dangerous bus stunt) or at the very least awaited the customer who rented Bullet in the Head to finally return the god damned thing. They were magnificent days of discovery, finding heroes with super human powers compared to the heroes I'd grown up with. Jet Li. Chow Yun-Fat. And yes, Jackie Chan. Under the masterful eye Stanley Tong or Tsui Hark or John Woo these men delivered feats of agility and fortitude that put the likes of Arnold Schwartzengoverner, Chuck Norris, Sly Stallone and Steven Segal to absolute shame. And they did so while often delivering uproarious comedy or extreme pathos or, in the case of The Killer, a little bit of both.
Then an amazing thing happened, a near life changing event. As 1997 approached and Hong Kong was to find it's way back into Communist Chinese hands, my heroes, well, they came to me. My head swam with the possibilites. Hong Kong action. Hollywood Budgets. Dear god, the infinite possibilities. I mean, John Woo carnage with a Michael Bay budget? How could that go wrong? Even Hollywood producers couldn't fuck that up? Right? RIGHT?
At first it was exciting. Rumble in the Bronx. Broken Arrow. Face/Off. SUPERCOP! Freaking Police Story 3! I mean, I'd watched it on tape almost a year before, but I had no fucking clue what the god damned movie was about. The tapes, after all, were made for asian audiences, so if the pan and scan cut off the ends of long lines of English dialog, so be it. Of course, for those of us Americans watching, we often gaped at the fact that it was the long lines of dialog that contained the plot of the WHOLE FUCKING MOVIE! But Supercop was dubbed. For the first time ever, American audiences watched and UNDERSTOOD Police Story 3. It was amazing.
I remember sitting in a theatre, watching the trailer for Lethal Weapon 4, groaning at the thought of it all. Then, as it ended, the voice announced: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Joe Pesci, Rene Russo, Chris Rock and JET FUCKING LI!!! Now whether thats actually what the anouncer said or not is moot. That's what I heard. I let out an audible yawp in the nearly empty theatre only to hear some redneck in the front row let out in full redneck drawl: What the hell is a JYET LEEEE? I remember turning to my buddy and saying: Oh just wait, you'll see.
And we did. And Jet Li was the only watchable part of that movie. Watching Riggs and Murtaugh get the shit kicked out of them by an asian god, proving for good an all that yes guys, you are finally too old for this shit. But it was a start right? The asian bad dogs had been let loose to wreck mayhem through the streets of Hollywood to change the face of American action forever.
Yeah. That's what happened. The dream died. All those Hollywood budgets carried with it American action movie pollution that poisoned the waters of Asian/American cinema. The Replacement Killers proved that Hong Kong style actioners are better when subtitled. Jet Li went on to price himself out of the Matrix Sequels in order to take paychecks on Romeo Must Die, the One and Cradle 2 the Grave. Tsui Hark went on to direct Jean Claude Van Damm's last gasps Double Team and the aptly named Knock Off before returning to Hong Kong to make cool films again. I mean for Christ's sake, he directed both Rob Schnieder AND Dennis Rodman. His career here was officially fucking over in the states. John Woo directed a racist as all hell war movie (sure the American Indians were treated with respect, but the Japanese were nothing but howling, bloodthirsty savages) but agruably has fared better than most (especially since his new film Paycheck looks like it could rock). Chow Yun-Fat's only great film since he left Hong Kong turned out to be the film he made in Vietnam FOR Hong Kong. And then there's Jackie Chan, America's most bankable Chinaman.
Now Jackie's had an up and down career here in the states. His highs are absolutely frenetic: Rumble in the Bronx, Shanghai Noon, Rush Hour 2. But his lows are conversly attrocious: Shanghai Knights and The Tuxedo. Like a Manic/Depressive ex-girlfriend you're never quite sure if Jackie's going to try to kiss and make up with you the next time you meet, or try to run you down with his car.
The Medallion, unfortunately, is the latter. This is about as low as Jackie Chan sinks. Backed up by a multi-national cast of B-movie misfits and A-list failures (and one man of myth and legend who is given about 3 lines during the breadth of the film) The Medallion consistantly goes from bad to worse.
In this god fraking awful remake of Eddie Murphy's "The Golden Child" (piracy this blatent can ONLY be a remake) Jackie must protect a sacred, Budhist child with mystical powers from an evil "Mastermind". Devoid of ANY character motivation or backstory WHATSOEVER, this movie plays out more like a video game than a movie. Now I've heard people refer to certain movies (especially Begind Enemy Lines) as LOOKING more like a video game than a movie, but to me they still felt like films. This LOOKS like a movie, but has the soul of a play-it-and-forget-it video game.
The first third of the movie is a series of action scenes each seperated by a minute or so of dialog that feel more like cut scenes than actual exposition. Sure, many of you are probably reading this asking, pleading and screaming at the monitor "SO WHAT??? We go for the action, not the PLOT!" Yeah, I feel you, really I do. I love mindless action as much as anybody. But even mindless action requires that you know why a character is where he is and what exactly he's doing there for it to work. Here, you barely have the slightest clue what the hell is going on in each scene except that Jackie keeps showing up places where he gets in trouble.
And unfortunately he is backed up by a cast that only succeeds in making Jackie look like Sir Lawrence Olivier. Claire Forlani (who while hot as all hell and has managed her way into once classic (Mallrats) and a couple of decent flicks, has partaken in her share of embarressing misfires (Meet Joe Black, Boys and Girls and depending on your opinion of it, Mystery Men). Here she's actually allowed to hit the screen with her actual accent (she's Brittish guys) but ends up spending most of her time reminding me of Angelina Jolie in the too-awful-to-want-to-remember Tomb Raider series. Sure, by default, Jolie is really doing an impression of her (Claires older and has the accent for real) but Tomb Raider came first and the comparisson isn't in the least bit flattering. Not to mention, well, her character, while present in at least half the scenes, Literally has no character whatsoever save someone who once spent some time with Jackie previously. Nope, there's nothing else to her. IMDB says her name's Nicole James, but I'll be damned if they used her name more than once in the movie. Hollow doesn't even begin to describe the character Claire is given to work with, and thus, she comes up short.
Then there's Lee Evan's, another Brit, who brought me to the stunning realization that Jim Carey really is unbelievably fucking brilliant, a fucking genius of epic proportions. Only by watching someone else try and attempt his material did I fully understand just how hard making people laugh at talking out your ass really is. This guy, dear god, I longed at every painful moment he was on the screen for him to suffer an Anthony Edwards Top Gun Goose moment to drive Jackie Chan to revenge. Cliche be damned, I wanted him to die. Painfully. His very presence brings the movie to levels of utter ridiculous that it simply did not need. I mean, this movie had achieve utterly unbelievable levels already with it's choice of actors to play the Villain.
Julian Sands. Yes, the Warlock himself. The man who boxed Helena. Now I love Julian Sands. LOVE him. He's a fantastic actor and can be both an intollerable menace and a gentle nurturer when given the right role. But he's the WARLOCK. Yeah, that was cool as shit for it's time, but that was 1989. Julian Sands would have been a great choice had this been a slick suited villain of quiet menace, manipulating his thugs secretly from behind the scenes. But no. This villain dresses like he raided David Bowie's wardrobe circa 1975 and desires nothing more than to be a supernatural god with infinite power. Oh, and he isn't above killing children to do it. Yeah, this role doesn't simply remind you of Warlock. It fucking conjures it and reminds you of how superior Warlock is to this pile.
It was actually when Julian Sands first strolled onto screen in his Glam Gear that I realized that this wasn't a Jackie Chan movie. It wasn't really a video game either. Wait wait wait. A rugged, characterless cop, a rugged charecterless pair of breasts, a goofy sidekick whose jokes plain suck, the Warlock as an archvillain and a Plot stolen from the Golden Child. Holy shit. The Medallion isn't a modern film at all. It's a terrible 80's film. A really Terrible 80's film. The kind of film they show on late night TNT between repeat viewings of Nighthawks and The Beast Master. That filler movie that you just plum had forgotten about because it was just so bad but some exec over at Turner's held some gleeful childlike love for, that all his buddies chide him about.
Watching this film made me understand not just the death of Asian/American cinema and not just the Brilliance of Jim Carey, but it made me understand my parents. It made me understand why my parents left the room whenever I popped in classics like The Eliminators, The Barbarians, and Yor, Hunter from the Future. Because these are the types of bad films only children with the attention spans of Robin Williams on coke and movie geeks in love with Kitsch can truly enjoy. They're bad films slapped together with elements that the producers know will SELL, but they have no clue how to make those elements work within the framework of the film.
That's the kind of movie the Medallion is. Complete with a lame as all hell climax that involves a side character Saying "Jackie do "this" now! It's the only way to defeat him" resulting in him immediately doing it and proving that indeed, yes, that was the only way to defeat him, this movie dares to go into territory that not only fails to entertain, but ultimately makes you long for the not nearly as bad 80's movies that this reminds you of.
Does this film have it's moments? Sure. The special effects at the end rules (one effect that is) and I'm certain it cost half the budget to accomplish. One scene with Lee Evans and his wife simply is one of the best comedy gags in recent memory. And of course the first scene where Jackie kinda tangles with Julian Sands is vaguely neat. But aside from that there is not a single stunt, not a single fight sequence, that evoked a single emotion out of me. Honestly, this movie would have bored me if not for it's ability to completely hypnotize me with just how unbelievably terrible it managed to be. This isn't a movie that wasn't, nor was it a movie that could have been. This is a movie that was. Fifteen years ago. If only it had come out then, maybe I would hold it in the regard that several 10 years olds had held it in when we all left this evening. I don't envy them the brainache this is going to cause 10 years from now, when they sit their dorm buddies down to watch one of their favorite childhood movies they somehow hadn't ever seen, only to suffer through the movie I suffered through tonight. I've had that feeling. I showed my roommates the Barbarians. I tormented my ex-grilfriend with The Eliminators. And I'm sorry. As Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung (the in-action coordinator) and Gordon Chan (the director) should be for this. These guys are talented and this is inexcusable.
Me, I'm gonna blame it on Hollywood, after all this is like one of their shitty 80's movies. Personally, I'm gonna hold out that hope and prey that maybe, just maybe, Hollywood will eventually get Hong Kong right. Until then, at least we still have Hong Kong.
Pyul Mactackle
