The hilarious, knockabout "Shanghai Noon," Jackie Chan's best American picture to date, breathes fresh life into the virtually dormant comedy-western. It also marks the relaxed and confident directorial debut of Tom Dey, working from a consistently funny, inventive and perceptive script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, whose previous major screen credit was "Lethal Weapon 4."
To top off all these pluses, Chan has a sensational sidekick in Owen Wilson and a beautiful and intrepid leading lady in Lucy Liu. All in all, it's a kick in more ways than one.
The film opens like "The Last Emperor," in Beijing's Forbidden City in all its vast grandeur, pomp and ceremony. It's 1881, and the exquisite Princess Pei Pei (Liu), who's been reading "The Sleeping Beauty" in English and longing to live happily ever after, resists being married off to the emperor, a goofy 12-year-old.
She naively allows herself to be spirited away by a young Briton (Jason Connery) who delivers her to an evil ex-Imperial Guard, Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), who runs a Nevada mine with Chinese forced labor. He sends word that the princess' safe return depends upon receiving a treasure in gold. Imperial Guardsman Chon Wang (Chan) winds up in a party dispatched to Carson City to ransom the princess.
Mayhem comes fast and furious when the train carrying the Imperial party, dressed in their elaborately embroidered silk robes, is held up by rowdy bandit Roy O'Bannon (Wilson) and his really nasty henchmen (headed by Walter Goggins). O'Bannon, a tall, rangy blond guy and a classic western good-bad man, and the rugged Chon strike up a wildly seesawing relationship, squaring off repeatedly but with O'Bannon gradually ending up Chon's sidekick.
Roy is much amused when he finally learns Chon's name, which comes out of his mouth sounding like "John Wayne," a name O'Bannon finds comically inappropriate for a frontiersman. (Never mind Roy's real name.)
When Chon, in one of his literally countless grand flourishes of martial arts, rescues a small Sioux boy from some Crow warriors, the Sioux chief (Russell Badger) treats Chon to a peace pipe so powerful that he finds himself waking up the next morning betrothed to the chief's gorgeous daughter (Brandon Merrill).
"At least he's not a white man," shrugs the chief philosophically, in one of the film's amusing multicultural asides.
