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The Medallion

The Medallion

List Price: $14.94
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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Bashful's DVD Summary #023
Review: Best:

1) Jackie doesn't spend a lot of time making his usual goofy faces or doing slapstick routines to entertain.
2) The comedy relief is done by a supporting cast of British actors who offer an offbeat twist.
3) There's a producer/editor commentary track and 15 deleted scenes.

Worst:

1) Jackie's medallion-induced superpowers don't kick in until the movie is half over. When they finally do, they're manifested mainly through wire work and simple lighting effects.
2) The villians, in general, weren't all that scary. That made the final good guys vs. bad guys showdown unfulfilling.

Recommendation:

If you're a Jackie Chan fan, you'll want to see this one at least once. Since it's so different from his usual fare (using wires and not clowning around so much), you might think hard before buying it at the full retail price.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Awful
Review: Don't waste your money, much less your time. Awful, awful, awful. About half-way through you get the impression that everyone just gave up.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I want my time back.
Review: This was by far the WORST Jackie Chan movie i have ever seen. Don't get me wrong, i love Jackie Chan, i have seen most of his movies. Jackie can do anything, climb up walls in less than 5 seconds, stop international threats, and the like. But something that Jackie can not do is lead in a romance movie. It was just so bad, watching him play the romantic, and the girl was such a bad actress, it was painful to watch.

Don't get me started on the side-kick, he and Jackie just didn't have the chemistry that the other guy and Jackie had in 'Shanghi Noon' and 'Shanghi Knights'. The plot line was weird, it's as if the directors are running out of reasons why Jackie continues to kick... in movies.

I thought that it would be cool to see Jackie catch bullets, and destroy car doors, but even that didn't save the movie. They didn't even show the bullet-catching scene in the movie!! It was only in the trailer!!

If you watch this movie and come out thinking this was his 'best', i weep for you. For all the others who can see a bad movie a mile away, steer clear of this. I only wish i didn't waste a 1hour and a half of my life watching this horrible excuse for a film when i could have been watching a decent movie like 'House of a 1000 corpses' (no pun intended).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Way Better Than "The Tuxedo"
Review: Inspector Eddie Yang (Jackie Chan) eats octopus. If that isn't tough, I don't know what is. He along with Interpol have to protect a young boy who holds the key to immortality and death. What? He has a copy of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? No! He has "The Medallion!" After Yang flipped over here and over there and after walking over a row of bicycles, he still managed to fail. The poor man drowned while saving the boy from evil Snakehead and left his noisy partner (Lee Evans) and pretty girlfriend (Claire Forlani) behind. This movie is pure flamenco! See Yang run through the forest like a ballerina and the leaves follow him like a swarm of enchanted bees. The famous scream sound is heard not once, but twice in this movie! Of course Yang has to fight a gauntlet of goons, but still wins. He even showed Spider-Man that he's got more power by jumping to rooftops from the ground! No web-slinging action here, just good old-fashioned Jackie Chan fun.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I beg to differ - more painful than a root canal
Review: This is a movie where casting and writing (and probably directing) demolished a good idea. Jackie Chan, as usual, was wonderful - Jackie could stand still and smile and be wonderful. Being older than him, I get a kick out of a 50 yr. old that can move, let alone balance on bicycles. Claire Forlani, who is wonderful in Meet Joe Black, has no passion in this movie. The way Jackie and Claire look at one another, it is clear that there has never been any relationship between them and that they just met (which is probably the case, so no acting there). However, I am impressed with actors who do their own stunts and in that, she was totally believable. I would like to see her in something where the guy really lights her up. So far Jackie and Brad just amused her. Lee Evans ( a Jim Carrey/Jerry Lewis wannabe) is as painful as Jar-Jar Binks and that's saying a lot; so if you hated Jar-Jar, you're not going to like him. I think he ruined the movie, and unfortunately he's at the beginning, and never stops. There are scenes where he's a bit better, but he's no Will Smith and Owen Wilson even starts looking good. This is one I bought - how could you go wrong with Jackie. Needless to say it's going back up for sale - I don't think I can take Lee Evans again. But I can't give Jackie a 1, so it's a 3, but strictly for him.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Pretty good job
Review: First off i would have given it a 3.5

Jackie Chan is almost 50, and still lithe as a cat scaling a wall. Nevertheless, it is clear in The Medallion that he is not the miraculous whirlwind he once was.

His fight scenes and chases, while still choreographed with balletic ingenuity, tend to highlight earth-bound skills - like that wall-climbing trick he still executes so effortlessly.

More tellingly, he submits at long last to the dominion of special effects.

Particularly in the second half of the movie, he sails through the air in fanciful style, propelled by wires and computer-generated illusions.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and heaven knows no other action star at work today has shown Chan's uncanny stamina. The guy deserves a break.

Still, the high-flying digital tricks signal the end of the pure-Jackie era of no stunt doubles, no wires and no computer effects.

Old-schoolers may mourn, but action stars like to show they are more than fists and feet, so why not the Chan Man himself?

As if to underscore the transition to a new style, The Medallion also gives Chan a reasonable facsimile of a romance, not to mention his first serious on-screen kiss.

Claire Forlani (Meet Joe Black) does an able job as Nicole James, an Interpol officer who reconnects with Hong Kong inspector Eddie Yang (Chan) when he goes to Ireland looking for a kidnapped child.

It seems the little boy was born to fulfill an ancient Buddhist prophecy about supernatural powers - including life and death - to be had with a certain magical medallion.

Naturally, a megalomaniacal bad guy - with the wickedly lurid name of Snakehead (Julian Sands) - has gotten wind of the prophecy and means to have the medallion for himself.

In the opening scenes, Eddie rescues the boy from a burning room shortly after sharing his octopus dinner with a street-side dog. (Nobody ever accused the Hong Kong action-movie community of excessive subtlety.) For the rest of the movie, he performs variations of the same feat, as the kid changes hands several times.

At one point, Eddie even appears to be stone-cold dead, but having bonded with the life-and-death kid, he gets to come back. His rebirth bonus is virtual immortality. He can feel pain but doesn't bleed when injured - as demonstrated in a funny scene when he is stabbed repeatedly by an incredulous crony.

That crony is another Interpol agent called Watson, played by the British slapstick comic Lee Evans (Mouse Hunt), who is sometimes charmingly clumsy and sometimes cloying and overbroad.

Aside from such tone-deaf lapses, director Gordon Chan, who shares writing credit with four others, observes the conventions of the Jackie Chan style while adding a layer of high-tech polish to the proceedings.

The movie's action scenes are choreographed by Chan's childhood friend Sammo Hung, the veteran Hong Kong director and actor best known in the United States from his stint on the TV series Martial Law.

Hung's playful take on martial-arts style perfectly matches Chan's own comic bent; together they pack more wit into a simple chase than most action movies do into their most elaborate showdowns.

It is that wit that is the sorriest loss in the turn to special effects. Anybody can fly with a green screen and wires, but it takes a creative mind to figure out a way for one little guy to whomp a roomful of opponents all by himself.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: a joke
Review: This flick stinks.They take a cool idea and destroy it by making it goofy and watering it down until you feel bored by it.They finally give chan a great leading lady and they take it nowhere.lee evans is great but this is the wrong movie for that character.In case you couldnt tell,I didnt like the picture.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: sameold, sameold cliched junks
Review: well, i didn't finish watching this junk. just couldn't. again and again, the cliched and shallow scenes repeatedly came up. again and again, there's always a clown in such hong kong style movies, now, it's an interpol jerk. if this kinda guy could be an interpol high ranking officer, then all the clowns in the circus must be undercover interpols too. it's the same just like the two lousy 'bad boys' series, if those two punk/thug-like high school dropouts could be miami plainclothes, then all the drive-by shooters in south central must be l.a.'s finest undercovers. no matter it's a comedy or action movie, at least it should have some watchable ingredients not just ridiculous craps to insult the wisdoms of the viewers again and again. these kind screenplayers or script writers, or whatever they titled themselves, should at least have some common sense to come up with something logically acceptable from the very beginning. a good comedy is not just a farce, a clown-like crazy junk dumping over the heads of the viewers all the time. give me a break!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A TOUCH OF SUPERNATURAL
Review: I liked this movie much more than "Tuxedo". I guess the underlying "spiritual" or "magical" theme appealed to me much more. Yes it was kind of a typical bad guy craving power vs. good guy fighting for a good cause - but I appreciated buddhist temple and a young boy with supernatural powers. I know, one would wonder if a little boy is all-powerful how could he get caught up in a mess in the first place). As far as special effects go - my favorite scene was near the end where the bad guy gets smacked. The movie has an alternative ending, though it looked more as an attempt to make an alternative ending because it didn't make much sense, or rather it didn't logically connect to the previous segment of the movie.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy the theme of this movie as well as the effects of "supernatural" powers.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: PROBABLY THE BEST RECENT MOVIE FROM JACKIE CHAN
Review: AFTER A COP [JACKIE CHAN] DIES, HE IS BOUGHT BACK TO LIFE WITH THE HELP OF A SPECIAL MEDALLION. AND HE IS GIVEN SPECIAL POWERS. THIS IS A LOT BETTER THAN THE TWO SHANGHAI NOON MOVIES. HAS SOME GOOD STUNTS AND SOME FUNNY MOMENTS. THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST JACKIE CHAN MOVIES [''THE LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER NOTWITHSTANDING BEING THAT IT WAS NOT AT ALL NEW WHEN IT WAS RELEASED 3 YEARS AGO] THAT'VE BEEN RELEASED IN THE PAST 3 YEARS. THIS IS A PRETTY GOOD EFFORT FROM JACKIE CHAN. IT'S DEFINITELY WORTH WATCHING. JACKIE CHAN'S GOOD FRIEND SAMMO HUNG IS THE ACTION DIRECTOR OF THIS MOVIE.


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