In this third Armour of God film, Jackie Chan can’t wait to get his hands around a big ol’ cock. And a snake. And a monkey. And a rabbit. And the remaining eight animals of the Chinese zodiac, rendered as a set of rare bronze heads prized by precious-artifact collectors the world over.
As JC, Chan is tasked with retrieving the heads scattered around the globe; a corporate slimeball (Oliver Platt, 2012) offers him 1 million Euros for each of the national treasures he’s able to obtain and/or steal, so off JC goes! Plot holes extend as wide as canyons, over which Chan gladly leaps. As director and co-writer, he’d likely do without a story entirely if he could get away with it; he almost has.
In a cinematic environment that demands its action pictures to be fast, furious and expendable, Chinese Zodiac is out-of-vogue, but either no one told Chan or he didn’t care. He remains true to the same unapologetic mode of the 1986 original and 1991’s Operation Condor, both goofy-smiled variants of Indiana Jones and James Bond, which is to say this overdue leg of an inadvertent trilogy is great fun, loosely bundled.
Right out of the gate, the film goes for broke, with a prologue that sees JC escaping a military base by playing human skateboard. From there, the star and company impatiently zip from one inventive set piece (and country) to the next, constantly vying for oneupmanship of itself. If Chan isn’t being chased by guard dogs while trapped in a garden maze, he’s dodging live ammo and busy beehives in the forest, all building toward a finale that ask the near-sexagenarian to skydive toward a lava-spewing volcano. Hell, why not? —Rod Lott