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

Buy it at Amazon.

While Machete Kills is nearly indistinguishable from the 2010 original Machete, it does bring one differentiating element to the table by beginning with a fake trailer. This in-joke within an in-joke not only nods to the accidental franchise’s birth as a faux coming attraction that kicked off Robert Rodriguez’s half of 2007’s Grindhouse, but also proves to be the best part of this sequel. Since it promotes a purported third chapter set in the realm of ’70s cinematic outer space, how could it not? Perhaps Rodriguez should have ended Kills with this gag, as the whole movie sets the story up for heading that direction; it’s like hearing the punchline first.

After his partner is killed during a mission at the border, the superhuman Mexican known as Machete (Danny Trejo, xXx), is hired by the President of the United States (Charlie Sheen, here credited under his actual name of Carlos Estevez) to execute a cartel turncoat / schizophrenic madman named Mendez (Demian Bichir, The Heat) who has a big ol’ missile pointed at America and a $10 million bounty on his head. Machete soon learns that Mendez has whipped up a life-insurance policy, so to speak, by wiring the missile to his heart; should his meat ticker stop, the weapon’s ticker starts.

And that’s merely one loco idea in the screenplay by newcomer Kyle Ward (and not by Rodriguez, strangely enough). Others include pairing Machete with a Texas beauty pageant contestant (Amber Heard, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane); befitting a bordello madam (Sofia Vergara, the hot tamale of TV’s Modern Family) with a metal bra that fires bullets; and having a character named El Camaleón be played by, in order of appearance, Walt Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lady Gaga and Antonio Banderas. Exactly none of these wacko bits advances the plot, save for the stunt casting of former Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson as the villainous Voz, a tech billionaire who happens to be a clairvoyant end-timer.

As with its predecessor, Machete Kills is to be taken as a chunk of cinematic queso, period. Trejo’s ever-frowning hero is easy to root for — especially for an action-oriented protagonist pushing 70 — and several of the supporting players get the joke, none more than the unexpectedly very funny Bichir. That joke has a shelf life, however, and would operate better under the economy of Rodriguez’s early work. (Lest we forget, his 1992 debut, El Mariachi, was only 81 minutes.) Even at his usual breakneck pace, this action-packed goof is just a little too long in the tooth — one that nonetheless still gleams with mischief. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

In Firefox, Clint Eastwood, in a bold change of pace, plays a renegade computer programmer who invents a new web browser that quickly becomes popular, making him rich.

Sound dull? Unfathomably, the real Firefox, in which Eastwood (also directing) plays a burned-out pilot tasked with stealing “the most sophisticated warplane on the face of this earth,” is rarely more interesting. Well, at least it gives us another entertainingly eccentric performance from Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man) on which to chew.

There’s more than a whiff of the lackluster from the start, when Eastwood suffers what appears to be flashbacks to a stock-footage festival he attended while fighting in Vietnam. This debilitating dread, played up as a great demon he must constantly battle, manifests itself mainly through Eastwood sweating and dramatically pausing when he shouldn’t as he goes undercover in Russia. Fully two-thirds of a movie ostensibly about one kick-ass piece of weaponry is bequeathed to a lethargic spy thriller rife with bad accents, dull dialogue and rather unpleasant jingoism.

All this could be forgiven, perhaps, if the main attraction were at all interesting, but even here, despite some really neat effects work by John Dykstra (Star Wars), the plane is ultimately a letdown. For a film built around the concept of “the greatest warplane ever built … a Mach Five aircraft with thought-controlled weapons systems,” the filmmakers do precious little to make it seem unique.

It looks cool, sure, but after a wearing hour and a half of setup, finally arriving at the “Let’s see what this baby can do!” point, I expect a tad more from an action thriller than a half-hour of cruising altitude and refueling while Soviet generals argue with each other over where the plane might be. And when there is finally some bloody action in a long-promised dogfight the likes of which we presumably have never seen … we’ve seen it before, and better, and longer.

In film, there’s Eastwood classic (Unforgiven) and Eastwood junk (Pink Cadillac). Firefox, all buildup and no payoff, is Eastwood meh. —Corey Redekop

Buy it at Amazon.

Tim Kincaid’s Riot on 42nd St. is so bad that it’s an argument for New York City officials’ Disneyfication of the area depicted — one of sex shops and flame steaks, of grindhouse theaters whose oft-flashed marquees were playing everything from Steele Justice and Penitentiary III to Masters of the Universe and Wet Hookers. Real wet hookers strut the streets outside to the tune of the Casio-clap soundtrack.

Having served time behind bars for killing a drug pusher, Glenn Barnes (John Patrick Hayden, Hot Tamale) brings his porn ‘stache and Haggar slacks back to the Deuce and more specifically, back to The Garage, the spacious theater owned by his family. Barnes aims to help them reopen it as a nightclub, thereby acquiring the wrath of Farrell (Michael Speero, She’s Back), the owner of the rival club across the street, Love Connection, where skanky women dance undulate in the altogether.

Farrell’s competitive business strategy is twofold: First, get his ladies to prostitute themselves to customers, and two, crash The Garage’s debut gala with automatic weapons. The latter proves more effective as his goons shoot up everyone in the place, whether they’re being entertained by high-stakes gambling, hoochie lingerie dancing, stand-up comedy (courtesy of actual “comedian” Zerocks, playing himself) or a woman crooning something about a “Uranus Child.” The shootout — with each group shown killed twice, the second time in gut-busting slow-motion — results in the titular riot. Then a cop played by future Lawnmower Man Jeff Fahey (in just his third movie ever) says something meant to be profound. Go home, people.

As cheap as dirt and probably as tasty, Riot on 42nd St. is punishing viewing that finds inspiration in repetition. Writer/director Kincaid (Breeders) flourishes with such incompetence, it all makes sense when you learn of his prolificness in the world of gay porn. This comparatively mainstream release is woefully flaccid, good only as a time capsule of the Big Apple’s sleazier, greasier times. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Singer-turned-actress Lola Falana (The Liberation of L.B. Jones) stars as Lady Cocoa, a spoiled, sassy “hot piece of cheese” who gets out of prison for 24 hours in order to testify against a mob boss. Under the watchful eye of two cops in a Nevada hotel, she bats her eyelashes, throws temper tantrums and scoffs, “You poo-poos!”

After she tires of tossing off the insult “Buster Brown,” she ventures into the casino and soon finds herself in a heap o’ trouble, being pursued by no fewer than two teams of hitmen, one of which contains football player-turned-soda pitchman “Mean” Joe Greene (The Black Six); the other, a dude in drag. The best scene has a car being chased through the casino by a cop on foot. Do the math.

I’ve long believed that there was no such thing as a bad theme song for a blaxploitation movie, but then I heard this film’s, appropriated from “Pop Goes the Weasel” (an alternate title for this cup of Cocoa). Director Matt Cimber (Butterfly) has it played over and over and over. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.