AFTER TRYING straight drama as a dad grieving over the death of his daughter in the hands of terrorists in "The Foreigner", Jackie Chan returns to his usual slambang action-comedy in "Bleeding Steel", a futuristic tale concerning a mad scientist and mutants, coupled with goofy slapstick humor and some very violent scenes where someone's heart is shown being ripped from his chest.
This is almost like a throwback to Jackie's "Police Story" films before. Set in Australia, the movie even shows Jackie doing his familiar derring-do scenes in an action scene shot on the top of the famous Sydney Opera House. He plays a special forces agent, Lin Dong, who is in a hurry to escort and protect a bio-engineering whiz, Dr. James (Kim Gyngell), to a well guarded facility so he can go and say a last goodbye to his daughter, Xixi, who's dying from leukemia.
He gives priority to his mission but he and his team faces the formidable villain, Andre (Callan Mulvey), a mutant warrior who's like a Frankenstein's monster who was transformed by radiation exposure. Andre now who wants to track down James to obtain the immortality serum that James has concocted. Andre's cohorts are called bioroids and look like the Stormtroopers of Star Wars garbed in black uniforms.
From there, the narrative jumps to the year 2020. Jackie is doing various jobs to be close to a student named Nancy (Nana Ouyang, a cellist who tries acting), who was raised in an orphanage. It is so easy to guess that she is actually Jackie's daughter we thought had died but was revived by a cybernetic heart. Several enemies who are biotech mutants then show up and we see countless frenetic chase sequences along Sydney's streets and even inside of Australian buildings.
"Bleeding Steel" offers a lot of action set pieces that fans of Jackie's Hongkong style action flicks then have gotten used to, complete with glossy production values, spectactular pyrotechnics and the usual hilarious outtakes and bloopers during the end credits. Told with very fast pacing by Director Leo Zhang, Jackie gets to face a lot of adversaries including a woman with flying daggers and a drag queen who seduces guys with plastic boobs.
Since Jackie is now in his 60s, so his production team now has to design for him action set pieces that will not overtax his physical capabilities and put him on grave danger. He's still quite nimble, but a lot more special effects are also used to enhance his stunts, unlike before when he used to everything highly physical all by himself and without any tricks at all. Actually, he'd be better off playing Nancy/Xixi's grandpa, but still he manages to have a touching reunion scene with his long lost daughter.Jackie is generous enough to allow younger actor Show Lo as Leeson to handle a lot of comic scenes. We've seen him before in the hit comedy, "Mermaid", and he has created a smart-aleck persona that is perfect foil to Jackie's dead earnest one. All in all, the movie offers quite a lot of fun.
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