Shanghai Noon (2000)

I figured that after a string of bad comedies, I would go for an action/comedy film that I knew was funnyish and had a happy ending, this latter more for compensating for the last film than the comedies. You can't go wrong with Jackie Chan when it comes to fast-paced martial arts action with some jokes thrown in. This is at least my second time watching this film, maybe my third. Somehow, I've never seen the sequel, so now I will have to go looking for that.
I like Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson together. Wilson's kind of humor and the character's penchant for avoiding actual physical combat make for a nice counterpost to Chan's kung-fu action. Actually, I tend to like Wilson's work with the exception of Midnight in Paris, where I just thought the whole script was bad and all the actors were flat and close to yelling their lines at each other for significant portions of the film. Maybe I just don't understand Woody Allen because I'm not intellectually endowed enough to understand the fine nuances of his work. What I do know is that every time Wilson teams up for a flick with Vince Vaughn, it makes long to see Wilson in another Allen flick. Not that I want to see Wilson typecast, but I like him best in comedies and Wes Anderson films. I realize that these two subsets of the movie world are not mutually exclusive, but I'm not exactly sure how to classify the Anderson films. Parts of them are hilarious and parts are damned depressing and parts are just different, but the total is always a good film.
The real treat in this movie are the women. I was just listening to a news item earlier today about how women are under-represented in film, the magic number being 17% in regards to starring roles and 28% in regards to speaking roles. That doesn't even take into account all of the women that are there as sexual objects only. There certainly are a lot of women running around in skimpy outfits, and far fewer women than men have speaking parts in this fiilm. At least the two female leads (who are in significantly less of the movie than the two male leads) are not simply there as window dressing. Lucy Liu plays Princess Pei Pei, who is strong-willed and after discovering the plight of the Chinese in America stands up to fight for them and protect them. We also have Brandon Merrill as the "Indian Wife" (I kid you not, that is what the credits call her), who literally saves the main male leads bacon every time they are just about to killed. Both women are capable of taking care of business and doing it with grace. Actually, in the mandatory-for-westerns bar brawl, one of the "ladies of the house" is easily the best fighter in the room, with the exception of Chan.
WAtching this has made me nostalgic for other Jackie Chan movies - I think I will have to track down the series he did with Chris Tucker. I'm not sure they made only three of those or if they made a fourth one, but I've only seen two of them, and the second one, I missed a chunk in the middle of it as something came up when I was trying to watch it. I haven't seen a new Jackie Chan movie in a while, but I'm sure that he must still be making them, so nothing is stopping except lack of slots in my holds queue at the library.

Shanghai Noon at IMDb