Jackie Chan goes sci-fi in ‘Bleeding Steel’
THE LATEST effort to give Chinese action movies a sci-fi makeover, Bleeding Heart stars Jackie Chan as a special agent trying to protect his daughter from biotech mutants.
Directed by Leo Zhang, the film features all the zesty fights, slick effects and goofy slapstick one expects from a Jackie Chan family movie, while composer Peng Fei’s deafening score mimic that of a Hollywood movie.
Coming third in the China box office behind Feng Xiaogang’s ’70s epic Youth and Chen Kaige’s supernatural fantasy Legend of the Demon Cat, the film can expect Chan’s international fan base to contribute to more earnings when it releases abroad, with particular appeal in Australia, since a good portion was shot in Sydney.
Jackie plays Lin Dong, a Chinese special agent in charge of the “witness protection plan” for Dr James (Kim Gyngell), a scientist specialising in “bioroid” soldiers on the run from one of these hybrid mercenaries, Andre (Callan Mulvey), one of his experiments gone wrong — a sort of Frankenstein’s monster who mutated due to radiation exposure. Lin is on his way to see his young daughter Xixi, who’s dying from heart failure, when he’s called to rescue James from an ambush led by Andre.
Andre leads a squad of bioroids whose uniforms suggest Star Wars Stormtroopers, except in black. Though these troops look ridiculous, the ensuing shootout — which takes place on dirty, rain-drenched Chinese streets — is captured with a dynamism that combines Hong Kong-style knockout combat with Hollywood fast pacing and Korean calibre pyrotechnics.
In one of many science-defying scenarios, Lin survives an explosion like the one that razed central Tianjin.
Thirteen years later, Australian writer Rick Rodgers (Damien Garvey) publishes a book on a mutated human girl with heightened physical powers, provoking two women in kinkily outlandish garb to sneak into his hotel suite in an effort to steal the manuscript.
One (Tess Haubrich) coerces him with flying daggers, while the other (Taiwanese pop-star Show Lo, dressed like a drag version of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction) seduces him using plastic boobs. Their efforts, however, are foiled by Lin, entering the fray Mission Impossible-style, making for a thrillingly vicious fight, for those who can look past its visual and tonal incongruity.
Meanwhile, Nancy (Taiwanese teen idol-cellist Ouyang Nana), a Chinese girl raised in an orphanage, is tormented by nightmares of a past life, interspersed with visions of a beating full-metal heart.
She seeks advice first from a witch doctor, then a hypnotist, and gets into various scuffles. Each time, Leeson is nearby to lend a hand.
Although the screenplay strains to keep Nancy’s identity a mystery, it’s obvious long before the actual reveal that she’s the once-ailing Xixi, resuscitated by a cybernetic heart.
The production team had to design set pieces that don’t overstretch Jackie’s physical abilities, such as a scene set on the roof of the Sydney Opera House, which evokes his famous slide down Rotterdam’s Willemswerf Building in Who Am I.
Playing yet another concerned father in relatively close proximity to The Foreigner, which opened just a few months ago, the increasingly haggard Jackie comes across cheerless in dramatic mode. At 63, he’s better off playing young Xixi’s grandpa.
Lo provides the comic relief that Chan once dispensed so readily.
Having played a handsome narcissist who ends up making a fool of himself in Stephen Chow’s Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons and Mermaid, Lo has developed a blundering smart-aleck persona that works unexpectedly well opposite Jackie’s leaden earnestness, while slyly undermining the over-the-top robotic villains, including the one-dimensional Andre.