As a fan of movie Westerns, I got the biggest kick every time a reference was made or an homage paid to characters and films that had gone before. Most obvious of course is the title knock off of genre favorite "High Noon", and it just keeps building from there. Chon Wang/John Wayne was a hoot, along with the very obvious naming of the bad guy sheriff after high profile character actor Lee Van Cleef. Then there's the bit where Jackie Chan's horse does the gimmick with the blanket, something I'd seen done before by no less notable equine stars as Roy Rogers' Trigger and Tonto's Scout in pictures going back to the early 1950's. Above all, I couldn't help noticing in scene after scene how much Owen Wilson looked like Redford's Sundance Kid, so much so that I could almost picture him as Paul Newman's sidekick in that 1969 film, except Wilson couldn't even come close as an actor. Which is OK if you're going for the over the top kind of comedy that this one does, but then you have to be prepared for mixed results.
By that I'm thinking about scenes like the drunken hot tub splish splash that would have been alright if done just once, but got to be tedious after just the second time. There were just too many moments like that one that seemed to interfere with the flow of the story. Brandon Merrill had the thankless task of Chon Wang's Indian wife, who seemed to pop up from time to time to let us know she was around, but without any real connection to the story. So she came through with a save near the end of the picture, but why do the flip flop for Roy O'Bannon (Wilson) as Chon Wang pairs off with the Princess (Lucy Liu)? Not very realistic or believable, especially on the part of the women. I would expect a Chinese princess to have more class than that, and an Indian maiden would certainly have had more discipline.
But let's face it, you go into a Jackie Chan film for the martial arts choreography and innovative fight scenes, so on that score, this one delivers. Hard to imagine how you could incorporate trees and moose antlers into a fight routine, but Jackie does it with style. I'd like to know if you could expend all that energy beating up on six Crow warriors and still remain standing, but I think we all know that answer - it's a movie.
Say, I noticed something that made me curious relative to a street sign in Carson City in the latter part of the picture. You could only make out a portion of the message that stated 'Bulldog Drummond's
'. So I did a quick google to learn that Bulldog Drummond's first literary appearance occurred in a 1920 novel. That would have been quite the feat to predict his existence approximately forty years into the future from the story's setting in 1881. Somehow I don't think Chong Wang and O'Bannon needed the help of a fictional British detective.
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