New Jackie Chan Flick ‘Too Violent’ for Mainland
Well, to be quite honest, this is pretty much the only thing I could read about a Jackie Chan movie that would make me want to see it. You might be tempted to rebut with, “well what if you heard he and Chris Tucker were doing another Rush Hour?” And to that I would say, “nope.” Because for the most part, and I’m sorry to all my friends in Hong Kong for saying this (don’t really have any), but Jackie Chan sucks. I know he’s a Chinese action hero and is really funny when he speaks English and does those Visa ads with Yao Ming, but his movies suck. And he’s 54 years old. That said, Chan’s latest, Shinjuku Incident, coming out in April, is so gory, says director Derek Yee, that he’s not even bothering with a release in the mainland. And that makes me want to see it. According to the AP:
Yee said the $25 million Chinese-language movie, in which Chan plays a refugee who escapes to Japan and becomes a killer for the mob, has scenes that show characters getting a hand chopped off and pierced with knives.
“We tried to cut the violent scenes to meet the requirements of the Chinese market, but producers I invited to watch that version thought it was incomplete,” he said.
The takeaway from this story isn’t that Jackie Chan sucks, or that his new movie sounds kind of cool. It’s that perhaps Hong Kong directors, who for decades have been watering down their finished products in order to create something suitable for the delicate mainland, may just be giving up on the China market altogether. Why bother anymore, when a film like Shinjuku Incident will have a wide release all over Southeast Asia and Japan? If the mainland Chinese want to be treated like children (who can’t take some knives to the hand), maybe it’s time for the Hong Kong film industry to seriously consider leaving mainland China behind.
Shinjuku Incident comes out in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia on April 2 and in Japan on May 1 and Russian pirated DVD probably right now.