“A Legend” is another entry in the seemingly unlimited Jackie Chan universe, and despite its visual opulence, it is ultimately a bitter disappointment. The film joins the ranks of the many, many expensive but insignificant works that the action master has delivered in recent years. Released nationwide on July 10, it was massively rejected by Chinese audiences: With production costs of a good 50 million dollars, “A Legend” brought in a meager 11 million dollars and was not received well by critics either.
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The film is another collaboration between Jackie Chan and his long-time buddy Stanley Tong, a collaboration that has produced such pleasing and successful results in recent decades as “Police Story 3: Supercop” (1992), “Police Story 4: First Strike” (1996) and especially “Rumble in the Bronx” (1995), which finally made Jackie Chan famous in the USA. Tong also directed “The Myth” (2005) and “Kung Fu Yoga” (2017), on which the new film is supposedly based – yes, it is even considered an official sequel. Apart from certain echoes in the story, there is little to be noticed of this, and you certainly don’t need to have seen the first two films to understand this one.
Chan, who celebrated his 70th birthday in April, made the good decision to play an age-appropriately subdued role as archaeology professor Fang, but – like many others before him, including Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harrison Ford – he could not resist the temptation to have himself digitally rejuvenated, which unfortunately was particularly unsuccessful in this case. In order to make this questionable idea a reality, the plot has to be split in two, which does not suit the story at all.
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The professor and other members of his team, including his assistant Wang Jing (Lay Zhang), remember in their dreams an adventure that they once experienced, well before B.C., during the time of the Western Han Dynasty in the vast steppes and mountains of northwest China. The trigger for these dreams is a piece of jade jewelry that they found during the excavation and that is said to have belonged to Princess Mengyun (played by Uighur actress Gülnezer Bextiyar), a wise, beautiful and, above all, strong young woman. After the violent death of Mengyun’s father, her mother sacrificed herself for her by marrying a leader of the Huns. The encounters between the princess and the two warriors who would later become archaeologists take up a lot of space in the story. After all sorts of complications, the action culminates in a moderately furious finale in the glaciated mountains, in which Chan once again indulges his love of snowmobiles and in which we actually get to see a few of the old master’s action moves.
Unfortunately, it turns out that nothing really fits together in this two-pronged story, written, like “Kung Fu Yoga”, by Stanley Tong himself. Storytelling has never been a great strength of Jackie Chan’s films, but in his early and middle films there were enough brilliant action sequences and humor to help overcome the narrative gaps. Here humor is only present in the form of a few very shallow jokes, and – we are now in the year 2025 – these are mostly at the expense of Wang Jing’s colleague Xin Ran (Xiao Ranpeng), who has to appear even in a snow-covered landscape in a miniskirt. Like some of her colleagues, Miss Xiao is visibly struggling with the material and does not seem to have had much fun on set. And unfortunately, the fights between the Han and the Huns are also pretty tired affairs, despite the most modern technology.
The only positive thing to note – another trademark of the Chan universe – are the opulent images captured by renowned Hong Kong DoP Jingle Ma, whose career stretches back to the mid-1980s. He is also a long-term collaborator of Jackie Chan and Stanley Tong. The spectacular landscape panoramas – most of the filming took place in the Xinjiang province – and a crowd scene in which more than a thousand extras and no fewer than 6,000 horses were supposedly used remain in the memory, but unfortunately little else.
The years since, say, 2015 have really not been good ones for Jackie Chan fans, apart from a few exceptions like “The Foreigner” (2017). But as we all know, you should never give up hope. With “Karate Kid: Legends” and “Rush Hour 4“, two projects are scheduled for release in 2025 that promise at least a little bit more than what was offered in recent years and in “A Legend”.
