Western action. Eastern flavour. Won ton of adventure.
The Emperor's former Captain of the Chinese Imperial Guard, Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), with designs on becoming an international opium dealer, concocts a scenario where the exquisitely beautiful Princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) is kidnapped and brought to the USA in the Wild West.
Knowing that the Chinese government has only two options: declare war or pay the high ransom, Fong is pursued by an acrobatic member of the Chinese Imperial Guard, Chon Wang (Jackie Chan) who along the way teams up with a rascally train robber, Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson).
Special Agent Matti
Shang-high noon. Geddit? Geddit?
Oh, well, I thought it was funny. Just like the film, really. It's a sometimes silly, sometimes wild, sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious action adventure of the kind that can only be achieved by Far East meeting Wild West.
Jackie does his usual thing with the exception that this time he's not even a hero: he's a loser who spends as much time scrubbing floors as he does protecting Princesses. Owen, meanwhile, is as much a stuff-up but in his own way: scraping through life by the skin of his teeth. He thinks more about the lifestyle of an outlaw than he does the life. Together they fight and squabble like a couple of kids stuck in the back seat of the car on a drive to Auntie Dawn's place. They have great chemistry.
As for the plot, well, it's better than you'd expect. It weaves in & out & around itself creating a nicely convoluted story that reels from crisis to crisis like a drunken cowboy in a brothel. The action is full-on, edge-of-your-seat stuff. The pace ebbs and flows with each ebb and flow getting shorter and shorter until everyone's running around like a herd of sheep with a drunken cowboy.
Shanghai noon is the best film Jackie has ever made and deserves your attention.
PG (Medium level violence, low level coarse language)
105 minutes (1:45 hours)
DVD rental: 22 August 2001
VHS rental: 22 August 2001
DVD retail: 24 July 2002
VHS retail: 24 July 2002