Patron Pick – Shanghai Noon

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Shanghai Noon (2000)
Written by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar
Directed by Tom Dey

“The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia.” – Mark Fisher

If you were raised in the US or live there, you are in a period of artistic decline. The big movie studios, always focused on the dollar, have genuinely given up on any pretense of their output having long-lasting cultural meaning. In the golden era of the studio, some executives and presidents understood they had to make crowd pleasers but always tried to push the medium forward. They would give money to some smaller pictures that ended up being the ones remembered all these decades ago.

Having just watched Deadpool & Wolverine (I won’t be writing a review), I have this profound sense of malaise. The movies consuming the most screens offer mainly a poor recreation of the past. Sometimes, it is done with an air of absurd reverence & others with cheeky ironic wink. In both cases, the end result is devoid of any human connection. It is nothing but a product meant to sit on a shelf and be periodically marked down until you find it in a bin at Wal-Mart full of other forgettable fare.

Sergio Leone took his nostalgic love of American Western movies and repurposed those images into stunning, epic reimaginings that ended up standing on their own and inspired other films to come. Leone and Westerns, in general, also took many of their ideas from the work of Akira Kurosawa, transforming samurai into cowboys. The whole time, they were presenting their stories with earnestness. This was not a cynical attempt to cash in on a popular genre but a genuine expression of love for stories that captivated them. That’s part of the beautiful ongoing conversation of cinema, how movies speak to other movies not with words but in images. It’s why I love movies.

Shanghai Noon was one of those films at the start of the new millennium that gave us a preview of where US movies were headed. This was a genre mash-up of kung fu/Hong Kong action and the American West. On paper, that sounds like a lot of fun. The problem is that Hollywood made this rather than Hong Kong, so the laziest approach to every aspect was chosen. There’s a set piece attached to almost every archetypal location from Western films – train, bar, brothel, mission, etc. The film adds nothing to these moments but a detached, ironic commentary from Owen Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon. This is not a love letter to the Western as it is a regurgitation of tropes with the occasional slapstick/kung fu moments.

The plot comprises many cliches intended to make the plot happen, come hell or high water. We get the inevitable rift between Chan & Owen when the former eavesdrops on the latter, misunderstanding what he’s hearing, pushing them apart for the focus group tested amount of time until they realize their error and are best friends again. That’s just one instance of an overdone movie trope that makes this a slog. Tiny bursts of potential are stifled by lazy screenwriting, a cycle the movie works through over & over. The difference between the older Westerns repurposing tropes was to tell a familiar story in a bold new style. The purpose of Shanghai Noon repurposing tropes is so audiences never feel uncomfortable for a second.

Jackie Chan should have been this film’s saving grace, except that the director doesn’t know how to film Chan; hence, a Hong Kong director would have been a far better choice. In fact, the action felt surprisingly slow. The momentum that should be there, hurtling the audience through a well-choreographed action set piece, is absent. I sat there astonished at how interminably bored I was watching Chan fight. That felt like an impossibility. 

If you have strong positive feelings about Shanghai Noon, then I guess you saw this when you were a child. I used to have lots of nostalgic love for shows like GI Joe and Transformers until I revisited them as an adult and just couldn’t handle to piss poor writing. That is this movie, something you remember as a lot of fun but certainly doesn’t hold up. The attempt at being a comedy is the biggest failure. I didn’t laugh once watching this and came in with pretty good expectations.

The only saving grace is that the cast is okay. These actors deserve a much better script and director than they are handed. Their performances reflect that, barely above Power Rangers level. I can only imagine an alternate universe where this movie took itself just a bit more seriously and had a cinematographer who knew how to shoot Chan in action. There’s nothing here worth revisiting for the nostalgic. You’ll simply be reminded of other, better films you could watch.