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Jackie Chan’s new film, The Spy Next Door, starts with a montage of old Jackie Chan movies — guns, fists, Jackie scrambling up walls — as the venerable theme song Secret Agent Man plays in the background.
It’s supposed to set up Chan’s character, an international man of mystery named Bob Ho who gets involved with a bunch of bratty children but, in fact, it serves as a reminder of his glory days. Jackie Chan was once a scramble-up-the-wall actor; today, in his mid-50s, he’s more of a scramble-up-the-stairs kind of hero. To get up the wall, he needs some help in the editing room.
The Spy Next Door, then, is the introduction of a prospective new career, one that has crept up on many a star: the over-the-hill action hero as butt of children’s violence. Arnold Schwarzenegger took his licks in Kindergarten Cop before returning to big-budget action films; Dwayne Johnson seems to have become stuck in kiddieland.
For Chan, it’s not much of comedown, seeing as he always used his remarkable agility for humour, and his screen personality always had a childlike innocence about it.
The Spy Next Door casts him as a mild-mannered ink importer who’s secretly a super-spy. He lives in the suburbs beside single mom Gillian (Amber Valetta), whom he is dating, despite the fact that they have no chemistry together, and I mean zero. To make the film work, Bob has to be a super-nerd, so Chan wears corny clothes and eyeglasses, and, coupled with the actor’s screen persona — frightened but nimble — he has all the sexual allure of Jerry Lewis. Chan is better off loving from afar than actually being seen kissing the girl.
The fly in the ointment is that Gillian’s three extraordinarily annoying children — a little girl who says “pwincess,” a young boy who uses big words, and a stuck-up teenage girl — all hate Bob. So when Gillian has to go out of town and Bob has to care for them for a few days, it’s his chance to form bonds that will make them all a family.
The spy business comes into play because the Russian villain — and it’s nice to see the Russians back in the bad-guy business — is after a secret formula, or a stolen computer code, or something.
This results in a showdown that pits Chan and the kids against some huge villains who, nonetheless, have no defence against flying dishes, cast-iron frying pans, and small children who hit them in the shins with sticks. Director Brian Levant fails to find whatever comic pulse might beat in this idea.
The Spy Next Door is aimed at kids — the target audience can be pretty well determined by the fact that Billy Ray Cyrus plays Jackie’s pal, and Lucas Till, who courted Miley Cyrus in Hannah Montana: The Movie, plays a Russian agent. Children may be charmed by Chan’s physical abilities. But these are visibly stiffening. There are several scenes that call on his ingenuity with props — swinging stepladders, using a bicycle as a weapon — but the stunts are filmed in segments that disguise whatever shortcuts Chan now needs.
Chan can still get around, but, like the rest of us, he’s slowing up. In his early movies, the outtakes over the credits would show Chan falling from great heights or breaking bones.
The film might offer an aging Chan a few opportunities to shine in his ongoing bout with the physical world. But it still raises the spectacle of an international superstar in another clunky, American movie.
news source: http://www.cinecurry.com/movie/english/spy-next-door
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