"Shanghai Knights"

"Shanghai Knights" follows the duo as they go to London and confront the treacherous Rathbone, but its real focus is the interplay between Jackie and Owen Wilson, which is a constant joy. There's a neat switcheroo going on in the roles they play. Though Chon is always more agitated than Roy, Jackie is something like the movie's straight man while Wilson, who gets the silliest and funniest bits, plays it deadpan. I must have seen Wilson in nearly a dozen movies by now and I'm damned if I can pin down what it is that makes him so funny. For lack of a better phrase, you could call it oblivious sincerity. Wilson has found a way to play cluelessness with the dash of a leading man.

When the movie opens, Roy has reinvented himself in New York as the hero of Western pulp fiction; readers thrill to his tales of taking down an entire valley of zombies with just one bullet. The gold he came into at the end of "Shanghai Noon" has been frittered away, and Roy is earning what he can as a not very good waiter and as a sought-after gigolo. Is there any other actor who could play a whoring, boozing profligate with anything like the boyish charm Wilson brings to the part? The look on his face when he daydreams about a roomful of courtesans ready to satisfy his every whim is too full of delighted disbelief ("Are they all for me?") to be called lustful. He's more like a kid who's won a really nifty bike for collecting enough box tops. When presented with a roomful of London call girls, Roy's idea of fun is to instigate a pillow fight. The assurance of Roy's constant wrongheaded commentary ("Whitechapel -- that sounds like a nice neighborhood!") is hilarious in a way that seems as if Wilson just tossed off his lines. He's found a way to make foolishness sexy.

Recently one of the celeb columns ran a report that Jackie Chan has acknowledged that he's starting to use stunt doubles. It's been apparent that he's been slowing down a bit; after the years of physical punishment he's subjected himself to, how could he avoid it? He's still capable of making us marvel, and Dobkin's direction is alive to the joy of watching Jackie in action. Dobkin never uses editing to conceal any physical limitations Jackie might now have. Instead, the director nudges him gently toward physical comedy. When Jackie's not dazzling us with some bit of physical wizardry, he's always been a charming comic presence.

Here he achieves a graceful melding of action, comedy and dance. At one point when Chon is holding off a horde of attackers with a brace of umbrellas, we hear a snatch of "Singin' in the Rain" on the soundtrack. I'm not saying that what Jackie does here is equal to what Gene Kelly does in that scene. But like Kelly, Jackie Chan is all about the lyric beauty of athleticism. Jackie makes movie heroes with superpowers seem like pikers, because he doesn't need anything except his body to make the impossible look like a lark. "Watch this," he might be saying to us before he sets out to gleefully defy gravity. As the song says, he makes us smile with our hearts.

Though it's always dangerous to make predictions, it's hard to believe "Shanghai Knights" won't be a big hit. It can be frustrating, though, to persuade people who shy away from commercial movies to see one. "Discerning" filmgoers have no trouble acknowledging the artistry of film stars from the past, but there is sometimes a tendency to see contemporary stars as just trading in commercial junk. That's especially true when the stars work in disreputable genres like action or comedy. You couldn't imagine anyone denying the "artistry" of Mae West or Errol Flynn. Talking about Jackie Chan in terms of "art" might sound a little pretentious. But what he represents -- the humor and charm and the sheer physical beauty of seeing him in action -- as well as the lazy, ping-pong repartee he achieves with Wilson, is the essence of the casual, deceptively artless art of movies.

So I'd like to close this with a word to the cinema-goers (as opposed to the moviegoers) who think something like "Shanghai Knights" isn't for you. Why wait for the critical monographs and museum retrospectives that will surely follow in 20 or 30 years? Jackie Chan is here now in "Shanghai Knights" and he's a joy to behold. So is the movie.

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