For years we've been wondering what it would take to bring together martial arts rivals Jackie Chan and Jet Li – but who would have guessed the answer would be a juvenile piece of cultural appropriation that is part Karate Kid, part Wizard Of Oz.
Chan plays Lu Yan, a wine-swigging master of drunken kung fu, with the additional handicap of a frightful wig, while Li is the Silent Monk, a taciturn, two-fisted cleric. Both stars also guy up for two other roles that only Stevie Wonder could fail to identify within the first few minutes.
The film's chief Hollywood compromise is the inclusion of Jason (Michael Angarano, mimicking Shia LaBeouf) as a nerdy teen who is sent back in time and off to China for kung fu lessons from Hong Kong's dynamic duo. Will these skills help him fight off the bullies he encounters in his own time? Frankly, it would be more satisfying if they beat him to a pulp.
Still, it's refreshing that neither Li nor Chan are the butt of endless ethnic jokes, as is usually the case when either of them head west, and at its best the picture is practically a greatest-hits compendium of classic kung fu movies, as choreographed by Woo-Ping Yuen, the innovative power behind The Matrix, Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
A fight in which Chan reprises his Drunken Master series, using Jason as just another weapon in his armoury of defensive moves, is classic Jackie Chan.
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On release from Wednesday
SAVAGE GRACE (15)
**An oedipal drama about the lethal love triangle between unstable high-society harridan Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore, right), her chilly philandering husband (Stephen Dillane), and their disturbed son Tony (Eddie Redmayne), heir to the Bakelite fortune, this should have been compelling.
Jetting between European watering holes, where the mother has her son entertain her guests with a reading from the Marquis de Sade, rarely have the rich looked so chic while behaving so transgressively. Dad sleeps with his son's teenage girlfriend, while mommy wakes up in bed with her son and his gay lover and tries to redirect Tony's sexual inclinations in the most hands-on way imaginable.
I'd call Savage Grace a soap, except no self-respecting continuing melodrama would render homosexuality, adultery and incest this morose.
As Barbara, the volatile heart of the story, Moore is trapped in a role that is not so much a character as a string of pathologies and poses, with a decline that seems straight out of the Dorian Gray school of decadence. On the inside she may become a morally bankrupt battleaxe, but on the outside she doesn't age a day in three decades.
This is the first feature film in 15 years from Tom Kalin and he had more success with his similarly difficult Swoon, about the murderers Loeb and Leopold.
Savage Grace is also based on a true high-society scandal, but all of its refined savagery in bias-cut dresses just comes across here as incredibly camp.
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On release from Friday