Back in the saddle

>> Jackie Chan makes up for a series of duds with Shanghai Noon

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

For all his visibility in the '90s, the past decade was not Jackie Chan's best period. The Hong Kong stunt clown supreme followed his breakthrough Rumble in the Bronx with a series of made-in-Australia quickies that could only be classified as blunders down under. The high-profile Rush Hour stalled, leaving only the overlooked Who Am I? to be remembered with any degree of fondness.

Chan goes some distance toward saving face in his latest, the kung fu cowboy caper Shanghai Noon. The notion's hardly new--check Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in the East and West, or that old TV show Kung Fu. The best instance of Asian action in the Wild West would be 1972's Red Sun, which had Toshiro Mifune as a samurai on a mission and Charles Bronson as a bandit roped into helping him.

Shanghai Noon follows a similar dusty trail. Imperial guard Chon Wang (get it? John Wayne!) must split the Forbidden City for the USA to rescue Princess Pei Pei. There, his train is hijacked and he must throw in with double-crossed train robber Roy O'Bannon. Then there's stuff with injuns, whores, drunks, railway coolies and psycho lawmen. You know, all your standard-issue Western clichés.

Essentially a misfit buddy flick, Shanghai Noon benefits from Chan's teaming up with Owen Wilson. Remember him from Bottle Rocket? He's got the role of soft-hearted simpleton trying to make it as a criminal down pat--he even flipped it frighteningly on itself in the overlooked Minus Man. Playing the noble idiot off Chan's rubberfaced resolve works like a lucky horseshoe.

Speaking of horseshoes, Chan applies one as a non-lethal weapon, during one of a rather limited selection of stunt scenarios. While this flick is low on Chan's trademarked, over-the-top acrobatics and martial arts choreography (not to mention cross-eyed in its perception of the racial tensions at America's foundations), it makes up for it by filling the otherwise-tedious dead space with a fun story, snappy pacing and--wait for it--jokes that are actually funny. In short, I wouldn't book this movie a room at a Best Western, but I would find it a spot at the Okay Corral, dig? :

Shanghai Noon opens Friday, May 26