At Home on the Range

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

They probably sold the idea with the pitch meeting's first phrase: "Jackie Chan in the Old West." Surely the deal was sealed when they mentioned his character's name: Chon Wang. It may be, as someone in the film says, a terrible name for a cowboy, but soften that g, and it sounds a lot like that of a certain massive movie star who won immortality playing Western heroes.

Chan, of course, is a smallish, sweet-smiling man whose sense of humor irresistibly enlightens his martial artistry. In Shanghai Noon he's a guard in China's Forbidden City who intrudes himself on a mission to rescue Princess Pei-Pei (Lucy Liu), who, avoiding an arranged marriage, has run far, far away to Carson City, Nev. There she is enslaved by Lo Fong (Roger Yuan), an unredeemable bad guy who is exploiting Chinese railroad workers, smuggling dope and demanding a ransom for her.

Eyeing his traditional Chinese garb, pioneers wonder why Chon is dressed like a girl. Others think he's Jewish. The slightly spaced-out Indian tribe that adopts him is just happy that he is visibly not another rapacious white guy. We can be happy that he links up with Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson), a train robber with the anachronistic manners of a surfer dude--a little too politely countercultural for his line of work and not half as clever as he thinks he is. He looks like a young Robert Redford (the movie makes a nice satirical reference to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but his genial self-regard--assailed by amusing self-doubt when he actually gets into a classic gunfight--is all his own. He's a terrific sidekick to Chan's funny, earnest, often victimized righteousness. This kid could be a star.

The West that he and Chan inhabit is more generic than authentic--come to think of it, a lot like the B-picture West in which the real John Wayne toiled through his early years. It's the kind of place where the subsidiary gunmen have no real motives--other than bad breeding--for their depredations, where barroom brawls blow up for no good reason and where plains, mountains and deserts are mixed without any particular geo-logic. This, of course, frees the director, Tom Dey, to play fast and loose with other kinds of logic. In his West, horses sit down when you need them to be up and doing, Indian princesses are as sportively knowing as any of the gals in Sex and the City, and a guy buried up to his neck in sand manages to dig himself out with a pair of chopsticks.

Structurally, Shanghai Noon is not exactly a tribute to narrative coherence. But that's all right. It's meant to be a fantastic stage for Chan's quick hands and fast feet. The man is a human special effect. And as always, he gives a full measure of devotion to his blindingly choreographed action sequences.

Increasingly, though, we go to Jackie Chan movies not for the star's good moves but for his good nature. He's the kind of guy you could ruin with slickness and overmounting, the sort of performer who flourishes in the hip-casual context that screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have provided him here. Everyone's having a good time, but they're not winking at us either--making us parties to their in-jokes. As a result, we have a swell time too.

--By Richard Schickel