Marking the 9th collaboration between Jackie Chan and Stanley Tong, which includes films like “Police Story 3” and “Rumble in the Bronx”, “Vanguard” is now finding its place in selected cinemas in the UK starting 11th January, courtesy of Cine Asia, along with a Blu-ray &DVD release. This time, however, the duo seems to really know what they are doing.
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The story is as simplistic as usual in martial arts/action films, and revolves around a series of kidnapping cases by a group of what appears to be a elite Middle-Eastern terrorists, starting with a businessman during London's Chinatown Lunar Celebrations. Tang Huating is the head of international security agency Vanguard, whose employees find themselves involved in a case, that soon unfolds on an international level, and expectedly, soon joins the fight, being Jackie Chan and all.
To most obvious aspect one will notice in “Vanguard” is that the filmmakers had a rather big budget in their hands, which they implemented in the most impressive way possible, with the movie looking gorgeous in all regards. In that fashion, the scenes in London, Africa, India, Dubai are all quite appealing to look at, with Lee Chi-Wah's cinematography making the most of the various settings. The antithesis of the scenes in the savanna, with the wild animals dominating the scenery and the action scenes to a point, with the glamour surrounding Dubai works quite well in the visual department, also allowing the action to take a number of different forms as the story unfolds. The eye-candy aesthetics also include the cast, with the protagonists, Yang Yang, Lun Ai, Miya Muqi and Zhengting Zhu all looking gorgeous, with the camera “exploiting” the fact as much as possible, although without any effort at sensualism.
The action, however, is where the movie truly thrives, particularly due to Stanley Tong's and Jackie Chan's decisions to not take themselves and the story too seriously, to include as many favorite themes of action movie aficionados as possible and to induce them with an uncanny pace, courtesy of Chi Wai Yau's editing. In that fashion, the film includes car and motorcycle chases, martial arts, lions attacking people, heavy weaponry, drones, girls with guns and explosions, the amount and level of which would definitely justify a movie about how “Vanguard” was shot. Particularly the job done by Guanhua Han in the fight choreography, Bruce Law in the car stunts coordination and of Tong in the overall coordination and planning is top-notch, highlighting both the design and the implementation by the stunt team. Granted, the CGI and the fast forward sequences do not work that well at all times, but even these aspects are lost inside the entertainment the vast plethora of action sequences offer.
Another great decision is that this time, Jackie Chan is actually one of the characters and not THE character, with the group effort that resulted from this choice working quite well for the narrative, particularly due to Chan being the main representative of the humor aspect in the film, adding even more to the entertainment it offers.
“Vanguard”, as was always the case with HK action movies, does not stand up to logic. However, both Stanley Tong and Jackie Chan seem to acknowledge, cherish and thrive on this fact, a concept that is quite obvious in the whole duration of the film, resulting in a title that could be described simply as pure fun.
