BEFORE Tom Cruise was strapping himself to the side of a plane taking off, Jackie Chan was sliding down a skyscraper, without a harness.
The man is a martial artist, stuntman and actor that has carved decades of legacy in the industry by turning his body into a punching bag just for cameras to turn the feats into hair-raising cinematic spectacles.
In the process, Jackie accumulated an endless list of injuries that would have put any other normal person six feet under. However, his films have rarely acknowledged his injuries.
At least, until Ride On.
The good, the bad and the horse manure
Written and directed by Larry Yang, Ride On is both an homage and an ode to Jackie’s previous feats, as he plays Luo, an aging stuntman who has been reduced to taking on bit stunt gigs.
Under Luo’s care is Red Hare, a horse that he has reared from the time it was a newborn foal with a crooked leg.
When the horse becomes an object of value by debt collectors and lawyers seeking to repossess the colt, Luo is forced to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Bao (Liu Haocun) to get the help of Mickey (Kevin Guo), a lawyer and Bao’s boyfriend.
Other than The Foreigner, Jackie’s recent films range from subpar to outright bad. There is no denying it; some of the films look like he’s just there to collect a paycheck.
Ride On seems to exist in the space between “subpar” and “decent”, especially whenever it isn’t comically slipping between Bao being worried about her elderly father and the horse doing dangerous stunts, Mickey’s existence as the film’s comic relief, and the moustache-twirling “villains”; other than the debt collectors who exist solely for Jackie to show off he still can do stunts, there is also a businessman that wants to add Red Hare to his army of horses that are housed in an opulent mansion.
The film also has a very distracting language dub. Originally filmed with Mandarin lines, the version that was screened for the press was with a Cantonese dub, where none of the lines are timed properly with the any of the actors’ mouths. Both versions will be available in Malaysia, but the original Mandarin language version will have a limited release.
Heart on its sleeve
The film is not action-heavy, as the fight sequences can be counted with just one hand, and some of the setpieces are rather standard Jackie Chan-fare. The first one, involving an extended chase between Luo, the horse and the debt collectors is somewhat passable, even if Jackie has clearly, intentionally “slowed down” in terms of speed and choreography.
Instead, Ride On is the exact opposite of what someone would expect in a Jackie Chan film; it is probably the most sentimental film Jackie has done in recent years.
The film functions as kind of a meta-commentary on stuntmen and their dangerous line of work, and the obsession that is the sole motivator in getting them out of their bed to repeatedly put themselves in compromising positions on film sets.
It becomes an important aspect to the tension in Luo and Bao’s relationship, and even has a dedicated scene where a montage of Jackie injuring himself in his older films are retroactively used as though they were videotaped scenes of Luo injuring himself.
The fraught, depressed, shell of a man Luo has become is also conveyed very well by Jackie’s acting, which is frankly surprising, as he plays against his usual comedic typecasting in these more personal scenes.
On that level, the film works, as an acknowledgment of Jackie’s past as an actor that is also a stuntman, why he can’t truly walk away from it, and as a chronicle of a living legacy of an action star who is riding off into his sunset years.
Ride On is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
