2016 - SKIPTRACE, action comedy from Jackie Chan

Skiptrace is the kind of film that Jackie Chan has been making since his big breakout successes which kind of started in the 1980's.  Chan once again plays his standard character of the Hong Kong cop taking on a major Hong Kong triad.  The film is loaded with a lot of action and Chan's typical physical comedy.  However time had started to take it's toll on this formula and on Chan himself.  Chan was 62 years old when this film was released and the years of stunts and tumbles had also taken it's toll on him.

There was apparently an attempt to bring some new blood to this film.  Renny Hardin an action director  from America was hired and for the second lead in the film American actor Johnny Knoxville was cast as Chan's humorous sidekick.  There is a lot of extensive on location filming in Hong Kong and more interestingly mainland China which is probably the best thing about this film. 

 

The film is loaded with Chan's usual stunts and he still goes through the fighting motions but he has definitely slowed down. This is hardly the same Jackie Chan of his classic film Police Story.  Nobody stays young forever and I sense a lot of stunt doubles were used during the action scenes in Skiptrace.  Chan being Chan he has also loaded the film up with lots of beautiful Asian and American women but never fear in Jackie Chan films all these relationships are very chaste.

 

Skiptrace clearly had a big budget and the director Renny Hardin probably staged the action scenes about as well as anyone could.  However Chan (who was one of the producers) has gone to the well one to many times with this setup and the whole film is kind of boring in spite of all the fighting and stunt work.

Written by Jay Longino and BenDavid Grabinski but it's essentially the same film Jackie Chan has been making almost his entire career.  The running time is 108 minutes.