"Shanghai Knights"

Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper ride the Magic Bus in this daffy, delightful voyage to swinging London, circa 1890.

By Charles Taylor

Feb 7, 2003 | There wasn't a minute of "Shanghai Knights" that didn't have me grinning. Lurking around the edges of this sequel to the 2000 Western comedy "Shanghai Noon," set mostly in London during Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, you can find Jack the Ripper, the origin of Sherlock Holmes, and even a dash of "Oliver Twist." There are anachronistic references to the Beatles and Charlie Chaplin, along with '60s rock songs on the soundtrack. Escaping from one of their numerous tights spots, Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson dash to freedom in a newfangled auto-mo-bile, to the accompaniment of the Who's "Magic Bus."

It's a fantasy of London culled from history and literature and pop culture, all our Anglophile fantasies mushrooming in one place like a daydream run amok. I'd venture to guess that most Americans visiting London for the first time hope, somewhere in the back of their minds, to see Dickensian urchins roaming market stalls or John, Paul, George and Ringo running down the street. So the collision of eras in "Shanghai Knights" all makes a weird kind of sense. Since you can do anything in the movies, there's no good reason why the sights of Victorian London shouldn't be unveiled to us to the tune of Roger Miller's "England Swings."

What's cheering about "Shanghai Knights" is that the people who made it realize that, by itself, that kind of cleverness isn't enough. The director, David Dobkin, and the writers, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, work here with care, affection and a blessedly light touch. They aren't out to deliver the goods in the crassest possible manner, or turn the movie into an action-comedy bash. "Shanghai Knights" is a cunning mixture of the calculated and the offhand. It's thoroughly commercial but made without a trace of cynicism. Seeing that sort of mainstream movie can give you a lift; it can, for a while at least, wash you clean of feeling jaded.

The press material for "Shanghai Knights" quotes producer Roger Birnbaum as saying that, together, Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson achieve something like the casual, shaggy-dog laughs of the Hope-Crosby "Road" pictures. That's not just a producer blowing smoke. There's enough of a plot here to provide a framework for the fights and stunts and gags, but not one complicated enough to get in the way of the stars. Dobkin (whose only previous feature was 1998's "Clay Pigeons") brings just the right degree of precision and clarity to the action sequences. It always feels like a minor miracle to watch action scenes that haven't been edited through a Cuisinart into incoherence; thanks are due for that to editor Malcolm Campbell.

Cinematographer Adrian Biddle and production designer Allan Cameron give the movie a nice storybook sumptuousness without ever making it feel fussy or slaved over. When we see Jackie (I can't call him "Chan") standing at the deck of a ship steaming toward England, the shot serves no purpose except to allow the churning ocean to fill the Panavision frame. A later digitally composed shot gives us an airborne view of 19th century London. When the two heroes are dangling from the hands of Big Ben, you can take time to admire the beauty of the composition of nighttime London spread out beneath them. All these shots, none held longer than they should be, provide one of the most luxurious indulgences the movies have to offer: postcard views of picturesque places.

That isn't even the oldest trick that "Shanghai Knights" has up its sleeve. The movie keeps pulling the hoariest bits: fireplaces that swivel around so characters disappear from rooms, portraits with hollowed-out eyes used for peepholes, secret passages, even the wax museum routine where characters freeze pretending to be mannequins. When the leads tussle with New York's finest, the lawmen are, inevitably, dressed like the Keystone Kops. It's not fresh, but it's all executed with such briskness and unfailing good humor that you laugh at the daring of using such ancient routines. The people on-screen -- and the people behind the camera -- always act as if they're doing something really spiffy.

This installment of the adventures of Jackie's Chon Wang -- say the name out loud a few times and you'll get the joke of using it for a Chinese Western hero -- and Wilson's Roy O'Bannon finds the two of them in London hunting down the enemies of the Chinese emperor, who have stolen the Imperial Seal. They're aided this time by Chon's sister, Lin (Fann Wong, a mighty mite with a prankish sense of comedy), and Artie (the amusingly gangling Thomas Fisher), a Scotland Yard inspector who harbors the brain of a supersleuth in the body of a P.G. Wodehouse ass. They're up against the emperor's archenemy (Donnie Yen, the type you can tell is a baddie just by the sheen of his brilliantined hair) and an evil fop of an English lord named Rathbone (a nod to Basil Rathbone, played by Aiden Gillen) with whom he's in cahoots.

Next Page: Owen Wilson plus a roomful of hookers equals ... pillow fight!

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