SHANGHAI NOON

East meets West action comedy

In his first American film since Rush Hour, Jackie Chan returns to an old story idea of his: A 19th century Forbidden City guard travels to the American West to rescue a kidnapped princess. It's taken years for this story to reach the screen - and it was even shanghaied by Tsui Hark for his entry in the Wong Fei Hung series Once Upon A Time in China and America - but the result is finally here.

With a set-up much the same as Rush Hour, Shanghai Noon will feel comfortable for US audiences. Chan's character Chon Wang is more hapless than the determined cop he played in the previous picture, much more like a Buster Keaton character. Feeling responsible for the disappearance of princess Lucy Lui (Payback), he insists on being part of the party that is to deliver the ransom.

Separated from his companions, Wang continually crosses paths with laconic train robber Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson), a rascal - and poor shot - that eventually becomes his friend. Wang foils a train robbery, fights hostile Indians, is adopted into a tribe and married off to the chief's daughter, menaced by Roy's ex-gang, pursued as an outlaw, gets drunk in a whore house, is strung up on a scaffold, escapes from jail, acquires a comical horse - and generally encounters and sends up every cliché of the Western genre that the writers can come up with - until the final showdown, in which he must battle the outlaws, the law, and his own guardsman (including HK stars Eric Chen, Roger Yuan, and fight coordinator Biao Yuen).

Rush Hour relied heavily on Chris Tucker's ad lib wisecracks played against Chan's Chinese stoicism to generate laughs, but this feature is a much more suitable for Jackie. The writing team of Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, the pair that brought Jet Li into Lethal Weapon 4, are certainly familiar with Chan's work, and their script makes the most of it. They, in addition to first-time director Tom Dey, know enough about their stars' strengths to merely provide a framework in which they can do their stuff.

Owen Wilson, co-writer of the wry comedy Rushmore and one of the better elements of The Haunting, provides the perfect counterpoint to Chan. Though not the equal in fights and stunts to Chan's best work in China, this is a better film than Rush Hour all around, and presents a more rounded comedy overall.

Kung fu; explosions; gun fu; p-stars Chan and Wilson.

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