Mr. Nice Guy

MR. NICE GUY (1995)

I read somewhere that when we dream, the portion of our brain that starts working is really close to the section that controls our sense of motion. This is why so many of our dreams have to do with movement; running, flying driving. To chase or be chased. I think that, because of this, cinema is the artform that is closest to dream. And perhaps why the majority of movies, almost a hundred years after its invention, are still obsessed with people chasing and being chased. The cinema's patron god must surely be Diana, the goddess of the hunt.

Jackie Chan holds a special place in the goddess' heart, I'm sure. His movies, with their hybrid of comedy and action, have chase scenes as graceful and fluid as the ones in our dreams. Mr. Nice Guy, his latest movie to be released in the U.S., shows that after the plot is gone, after the comedy is gone, after the remarkable fights and stunts are gone, all that may remain of Jackie's film career is the chase.

Chan as Chef: Macguffin or studmuffin? You make the call. In this flick, Jackie plays Jackie, just as he has in the last several movies. Here, however, he plays not Jackie the cop or Jackie the secret agent, but Jackie the TV show chef, which could have been a device for some great slapstick but here it's little more than a pretense to dutifully twirl some dough and flip food from a spatula. He gets mixed up with a tv reporter (played by Gabrielle Fitzpatrick) who has just taped a violent exchange between two gangs. Now, both gangs want her and, since he's saved her, Jackie. The film definitely wins points for not beating around the bush. The gang fight takes place six minutes into the movie; Jackie and the female reporter are on the run less than ten minutes after that.

Although this film has some notable concessions to the U.S. market (shot in English with synch sound; filmed in Australia; a mainly caucasian cast), it only makes the film seem cheaper somehow. Someone at work who saw it came up and asked me, "Didn't it remind you of a porno movie?" Part of this is attributable to the lousy acting by every caucasian in the cast and part must be that, just as every scene in porn is a set-up for sex, every scene in Mr. Nice Guy is a set up for a chase or a fight for Jackie.

Directed by Sammo Hung, Jackie's old pal from the Peking Opera, Mr. Nice Guy definitely keeps moving, but both Sammo and Jackie must know not to list this as their best work. Every other Sammo Hung directed movie I've seen usually spends a lot more time giving every character their turn on screen, and Jackie, like a good chef, used to do a better job of blending comedy and action and plot in his stories. Although I would probably take a newbie to see this movie sooner than I would most of Jackie's other American releases, I can't really call that a ringing endorsement. The truth is that Jackie Chan is a prodigous talent who started turning out really lame movies back in the early 90's; a lot of us thought that the golden days were over. Then the brilliant Drunken Master 2 came out, giving everyone new hope. Now, it seems impossible to contemplate that Jackie can ever hit those peaks again and honestly, it seems a little unfair to expect a man in his mid-forties to continue to blend French farce, screwball comedy, Peking Opera acrobatics and classic Hollywood comedy with incredible kung fu to a finer and finer degree. All chefs, sooner or later, lose their pallette. My hope is for maybe just one more good movie, or for a Hollywood-Jackie hybrid that can help change what Hollywood is willing to try, and that he can gracefully retire, and that the Goddess Diana, at his passing, places him in the heavens where he belongs, chasing and being chased, falling in the sky, falling and flying like I've seen him do.

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