Jackie Chan’s ‘Railroad Tigers’ is a nod to Tarantino flick
QUENTIN Tarantino has long professed admiration for Jackie Chan — in 1995, he presented him a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Movie Awards.
Twenty years later, Jackie reciprocates, drawing inspiration from Inglorious Basterds while gleefully mashing together bits and pieces from dozens of other movies in a men- on- a-mission ensemble tale of courage and derring- do.
Like Brad Pitt in Basterds, leading a ragtag coalition of guerrillas against the Nazis in occupied France, Jackie gathers a team to take on the occupying Japanese in Shandong province in 1941, at the height of China’s war against invading Japan.
When a heroic Communist Eighth Route Army regular dies in Jackie’s village en route to blowing up a key railroad bridge on Japan’s supply route, Jackie, playing a humble railroad porter, takes it upon himself to organise the theft of the necessary explosives and their subsequent deployment.
Like the steam engine train on which the film mostly travels, Railroad Tigers moves at an unreliable pace, sometimes sluggish, other times madcap— but its best moments recall classic Jackie gags and sequences while also spotlighting a confident persona retooled for Jackie’s advancing age ( he turned 62 last April).
Surrounded by a crew played by so- called Little Fresh Meat actors along with his 34-year- old son, Jaycee, Jackie winningly reprises the loose-limbed, highspirited vibe of the Hong Kong Lucky Stars comedies of the ‘80s with charm if not a memorably balletic central performance.
An eager-to-please assembly of mismatched parts, the film additionally recalls in various bits Jerry Bruckheimer uberproductions like National Treasure or early, funny Michael Bay, such as The Rock.
There’s a shadow, too, of the galvanising epic train stunts in Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger. The mix of genres also evokes 2010’s The Good, The Bad and The Weird, the stir-fried South Korean Western from Kim Jee-Woon. And of course we would be remiss not to mention an obvious principal influence, Buster Keaton’s 1925 masterpiece of clockwork railroad mayhem, The General, which Jackie often calls his all-time favourite film.
Railroad Tigers is writerdirector Ding Sheng’s third feature with Jackie, after 2010’s Little Big Soldier and Police Story 2013, and while he has emerged as one of Jackie’s most simpatico collaborators and a world- class commercial filmmaker, this latest does not measure up: it comes on underbaked and overstuffed, juggling too many characters while moving the plot on cursory turning points, easygoing when it should be freewheeling, and, though pleasingly cartoonish, lacking the go-for-broke craziness of Stephen Chow or Tarantino’s cruel, unpredictable edge.
Ding’s visuals are slick, including passages of visual poetry, such as an airborne camera skimming across grasses heavy with fluff bending in the breeze alongside a river after Jackie visits his mother’s grave, making a promise to avenge her honour.
But it’s more compelling when the cutting speeds up, for scenes depicting the process of pieces of their unlikely plan, or when Jackie instigates an action setpiece or is about to jump- start a fight sequence with a pole or a pivot and then moves aside. Jackie does a clever dance in the more populated action scenes, gently jacklegging or sidestepping the centre of the vortex, no longer required to execute the moves he could in decades past. Instead, he is a mellow, even-keeled elder statesman, a compass pointing his men in the proper direction.
The film also provides an example of how to depict Chinese history: it’s no accident that Jackie and company are shown aiding Communist Eighth Route Army soldiers and not Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.