When I watched Shanghai Knights two years ago, I mentioned that I had not watched this film. So when I came across it at a church rummage sale this summer, I picked it up. And as I’ve been working evenings on my part-time contract of late, I haven’t had much chance to watch films. But I thought I’d watch one last weekend, and so I did.
So: The high-level plot of the film is that Chan’s Chon Wang is an imperial guard for the Chinese emperor with his eyes on the princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) who does not want to marry the man selected for her. She runs away with her tutor, who leaves behind a ransom note–instead of actually running away, she is being kidnapped–and she is delivered to an exiled former imperial guard running a set of Chinese laborers in slave conditions in Nevada. Three current members of the imperial guard are sent to America with a ransom, and Chon Wang gets sent along with them–the higher ups hope the foreign barbarians will relieve them of Wang.
When he gets to America, Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon leads a band of outlaws to rob a train. The new guy in the gang kills Wang’s uncle, the interpreter for the imperial guards and who let Wang come along. It leads to a train-borne Jackie Chan fight and to a couple of encounters between the characters where each is at an advantage to the other, but they eventually team up after another Jackie Chan barroom brawl. They team up to find the princess (and maybe to get the gold), and then a couple of set pieces involving a native American woman that Wang married by mistake who rescues them from several predicaments, and they get the girls and the gold. finis!
An amusing film. I cannot help but note that in the film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal China’s heritage and treasures (which is so many Chinese-influenced or Chinese-financed East Meets West films of the last, what, forty years?). So that was nice. And it did have Lucy Liu in it.
When I see Lucy Liu, all I can think is hubba, hubba. Because her character in Payback said that a couple of times. Or maybe just once.
She broke into television and films around the turn of the century; I saw her in Payback and Charlie’s Angels from around the turn of the century, but then not in much. Not because her career stalled, but rather because we had children and suddenly were not going to films or watching a lot of television.
These photos are from various points in the intervening quarter century. Needless to say, she is aging well.
