THE MEDALLION (2003) ** The plot's quite a bit like The Golden Child, but with a little less humor and spirituality. The music and visual presentation owe a debt to Super Mario. It's a formula that would have worked better if-every time they finally get something going-they'd spent less time fruitlessly obsessing on how to compete with The Matrix (you fools! Don't you understand that they only had to speed up The Matrix because they didn't have Jackie Chan?). For all that it's regularly, fairly entertaining. Jackie, Claire Forlani, Christy Chung and Lee Evans are all sympathetic enough characters that you're willing to care about them, even if the script writers did not. Lee does sometimes range into the irritating: there's a big difference between being silly all the tim- like Jerry Lewis-and quickly shrugging off the bum jokes; and being desperate for attention all the time-like Jim Carrey-and achieving nothing other than amassing an increasing mass of nausea. Lee lacks Lewis' genius, and only hints at becoming half as insufferable as Carrey, but he'd better watch it! In fact the only interesting character at all is Howard Gibbins (Deadhead anthropologists have too long been ignored by the mainstream, without worrying about it much), who is summarily dismissed from the narrative once it becomes apparent how much more interesting than everyone else he is.
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