Alot of you readers from outside of the United States write in talking about how the film release schedule in your countries is terrible. How you don't get to see a film we Yanks have been seeing for months. Well in the United States, we have our problem with... Jackie Chan films. Minutes seem like hours, days seem like years, years seem like the playing time of a Warhol experimental film. THE NICE GUY, has been playing for quite some time in the Orient. And has even been released... well read for yourself, this report comes from Dr. Halvorsen who has been fighting this 'slimey' practice of holding films back from people of other cultures. It makes me 'green' with envy to know there are so many cool films that will take forever to reach my local gigaplex. Sigh...
This was already completed and released to laserdisc (and, I'd presume, to video as well) overseas. It's probably not among his best, from the copy I've seen. It does, as always with Jackie's movies, have a couple of cool fight scenes, including one with a large balloon, but the climax involves [spoiler] a relatively lame sequence of Jackie using a large truck to destroy a crime lord's house. (There was a lot of business earlier in the movie about said crime lord not letting people were shoes or do anything to mess up his house, thus setting up for some obvious and uninteresting irony in what winds up happening.) I love the guy's movies ("Operation Condor" is on my top 10 list for this year), and I'll see this one when/if it hits the theaters in this country (maybe it'll work better on the big screen and [gasp] dubbed than in letterboxed video with hard to read subs), but I'm mostly hoping the next one will be better.
