Hey there all you troopers, Harry here with that patsy killer, Smilin Jack Ruby! This time the rib tickler has decided to sneak up and take a look or two or three at these here Disney flickers. I've seen SHANGHAI NOON, and will be doing my own thing with it soon. I liked it. Still not GREAT Jackie Chan, but it's definitely his best work in North America. Anyways... I'm just gonna let the man take it from here...

Where to start. Have caught three Disney projects over the last couple of days (well, two Disney and one Touchstone) and thought I'd write in about all of them as they're coming soon to a cineplex near you.

"Shanghai Noon"

If you're going in expecting "Once Upon a Time in China in America," don't. Even though there are similarities to the Jet Li pic (which isn't exactly the best thing he ever did), it is still a Jackie Chan family comedy and actually has a plot that is more than just Chan running from men in suits with guns, so it is worth a viewing.

Lately, Jackie Chan movies have been all about the stunts rather than the martial arts. Well, in "Shanghai Noon," it's more about the comedic timing/mugging than ever before and only a few fight scenes and a couple of big stunts go down. That's what happens when you make a movie with a plot, there's gotta be scenes where the plot moves along rather than just fight after fight after fight.

Still, I enjoyed "Shanghai Noon" and thought Owen Wilson was actually pretty damn funny throughout it. Chan got a few moments to really shine and that's always a plus, but his comedic chemistry with Wilson really worked in my opinion, so I enjoyed it. Will it make the $95 million that Premiere predicted? No way, but it was a lot of fun and hopefully is an indicator of what else Chan might do in Hollywood after "Rush Hour 2."

If you don't know the plot by now, it's the logline straight from the trailer - an imperial guard played by Jackie Chan heads to America to try and rescue the emperor's daughter. There he teams up with an outlaw who shows him the ropes. Piece of cake. All I can say about Lucy Liu is that she needs to stick with the small screen. After seeing "Shanghai Noon," it's rather understandable why Bill Murray told her to her face that she has no comic timing in front of a number of people. She can't act, either.

"The Emperor's New Groove"

There's been a lot of speculation about this pic, originally entitled "Kingdom of the Sun" as it has apparently suffered through well-documented changes and travails. I caught a very, very rough cut of the pic and it certainly is obvious that there's trouble brewing. I can't emphasize enough that it is a FAR ADVANCED CUT, which means that a number of scenes were merely storyboards and others were animated, but not inked or colored. Everything may change by the time this comes out, apparently this coming December, but it's a long way from "The Lion King" or anything close.

The basic plot, if you haven't heard it is thus: Emperor Kuzco is a young jerk ruling an unnamed Central/South American jungle land in the days before Cortez screwed it up for everybody. Yzma, a scheming sorceress, tries to horn in on Kuzco's power, and Kuzco fires her and her stud-boy/dolt assistant, Kronk. Her revenge is to kill him and seize power, but it goes awry and Kuzco is merely turned into a llama, albeit a talking one. Kronk disposes of him and he ends up far away in the village of Pacho, a peasant whose house Kuzco was about to destroy to build a pool. Pacho tries to teach him how not to be a jerk as Kuzco tries to figure out a way to re-take his kingdom and turn back into a human.

I'll start by saying what's good about it. The voice actors are great and the character design for them is fab marvy. John Goodman's character of Pacho is perfect for the pic and Goodman does quite well by his role. Patrick Warburton as Kronk is another outstanding part of them film and every time he was on screen (which is considerable) the crowd was laughing their asses off. Finally, Eartha Kitt as Yzma, the villianous witch, is a lot of fun. Yes, her character is an amalgam of past villianesses, but so what? Kitt is obviously chewing the animated scenery at every turn and it works. Oh, yeah - Tom Jones works well as a singer at the beginning, but it doesn't really make sense as to why he's there.

Now here are the problems. Odd and irreverent humor permeates this movie and half the time it falls flat, much like David Spade's humor who does the voice of Kuzco. Half the time I was laughing along with it, other times I thought it sucked. Spade was okay. Spade played the emperor the way he plays every character he gets, as a smartass. The schtick gets old. There is stuff in the movie that makes it feel a lot more like a Warner Brothers cartoon Bugs Bunny-style than anything you've seen in a Disney movie, which is pretty interesting, but then it returns to the Disney movie you know it's in and it just seems out of place. Spade narrates most of the movie with a lot of self-referential humor and stuff that's really meant to interact with the audience, but it doesn't work as well as I think the Mouse House was hoping.

Example: You remember in "Gremlins 2" when the film "breaks" and you see the silhouettes of the Gremlins screwing around in the projection booth? That was kind of funny. Well, when similar stuff happens in "The Emperor's New Groove," it doesn't really work. It's an in joke, but it ain't "The Simpsons."

About the title - they mention it once. A guy gets thrown out a window for disrupting the emperor's "groove." Last time we hear about it. Also, there's a problem in that no one really interacts with people in this "vast kingdom." It's not like "Aladdin" where there's obviously a kingdom to go along with it's palace. In "The Emperor's New Groove," you never get the feeling that anyone's there and when a passing comment is made that "the people" don't even notice the emperor is gone, you wonder what people they're talking about.

"The Emperor's New Groove" works as a fable and that's about it right now. Yes, I know thousands of people have been working like mad on this trying to make it the kind of epic animated musical classic we expect from Disney, but the story and the way it's told simply don't work for me. If it were a one-hour special (the screening I saw clocked in right around a hour and six minutes, but it was missing credits and the obligatory Sting interlude) that claimed to be a re-telling of one of Aesop's fables, that would be different, but as it stands, with a real downer of a framing device, it just doesn't work.

The comparisons will be made between this and "The Road to El Dorado." Beyond the setting, they really have nothing in common. I was far more into John Goodman and Patrick Warburton than Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh. I'm serious, Goodman and Warburton make "The Emperor's New Groove" fun. If it were only David Spade (who I actually like as a comedian) I couldn't recommend this film to anyone.

The trailers are beginning to sneak out for this one, the new Disney live-action movie starring Bruce Willis as the image consultant who hits his 40th birthday and magically meets up with his 8 year-old self who believes he's a big loser for not being married, not having a dog, and basically not being a happy guy.

This is an odd little film and I'm kind of surprised to see Bruce Willis in something that's on this small of a scale, but hey, it works more often than not. His character is introduced with a couple of great, quirky scenes - one in an airport and then one on the actual plane - that really set the right tone for this piece. I enjoyed the hell out of it until the climax of the second act to be quite frank.

"Frequency" covered some of the ground covered by "The Kid," but did it with a much more "Twilight Zone" sort of feel. With "The Kid," Willis thinks he's cracking up when he meets his 8 year-old self and drags the kid to his assistant to make sure she sees him too in a really funny scene. Lili Tomlin plays Willis' assistant and is a scream. I laughed more at her than I laughed at anything in "Shanghai Noon" and about as much as I laughed at Kronk in "The Emperor's New Groove."

Yes, "The Kid" is basically what the logline says - guy re-analyzes life with help of a child's eye view of it, the twist being the child is his 8 year-old self. Where it gets muddy is when they try to explain it/do something about it.

*SPOILERS*

When the plot rolls around to trying to get the kid back "in his own time" "Back to the Future"-style, it goes a little bit off the track for me. I was enjoying it as a movie about an image consultant who thinks his mission is to fix his own image when he was still young, but is actually the story of his young self fixing him. That would've been fine. By sending Willis back in time to help his younger self win a fight, deal with his mother's impending death, and his father's anger, really puts a heavy load on the movie that had been fairly light up until that point. For me, this screwed with the whole tone.

*END SPOILERS*

Anyway, "The Kid" is actually a fairly enjoyable little family movie - not on the level of "Parenthood" or anything, but still a nice fanciful little tale about a guy trying to figure out if and when he went wrong. Not exactly all that memorable and not on the level of the "Parent Trap" remake a few years ago which was actually a nice bright spot for Disney live-action, but an interesting role for Bruce Willis, a "Twilight Zone"-lite plot, and a fun as hell film for Lili Tomlin.

I should add that Audrey Wells, who wrote "The Kid" (which is being renamed "Disney's The Kid" to avoid a Chaplin infringement problem), is the woman who wrote and directed the underrated "Guinevere" and the script to "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," both of which looked at tried and true plots, but put a unique and new spin on them, making them worthwhile films. "The Kid" teeters on the brink of being something special, but doesn't really make it.

-Smilin' Jack Ruby