Jackie Chan has done it again. After “A Legend,” he has released another bad film, and it is not entirely clear why he made it in the first place. With “Panda Plan,” he is doing even more damage to his extensive and glorious work. Its audience success was also quite modest. With production costs of $25 million, “Panda Plan” grossed just $36 million. That’s really not great, especially bearing in mind that the film was released on China’s national holiday on October 1, 2024, and considering that it was obviously intended as a family film.
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As soon as you say “family film,” you wonder how the first scenes of “Panda Plan” fit into this concept. The movie starts with a wild shootout in a church, clearly inspired by John Woo‘s action classics. But wait! It’s a film set, and Jackie only plays an action hero that he no longer wants to be. The screenwriter present, however, promises him that he has already planned two sequels to this film, which has not yet been finished. Whatever. Jackie is more tempted when he is asked to be the patron saint of a baby panda at Noah Zoo on a fictional island. However, he turns down invitations to a golf tournament and a housewarming party at Sylvester Stallone’s (haha!).
When he arrives at the zoo, he meets the nice panda keeper Su Xiazhou (played by Shi Ce, most certainly one of the People’s Republic future female film stars) and several other people who speak amazingly good Chinese. And then there is his protégé, the still nameless little panda. He is kind of cute, but completely fake because he is CGI-generated, as is the rhinoceros that Jackie tries to milk (!) because the panda supposedly needs milk. At this point, you just shake your head in disbelief.
In any case, if Jackie had hoped to be able to be a “private” person here, he was mistaken. Because an international mercenary troop, obviously mainly from Eastern Europe, has been hired by an initially anonymous client with a lot of money to kidnap the little panda. Temur Mamisashvili, a stuntman, martial artist and actor from Georgia, plays James, the leader of the group, which, to put it mildly, start to get on Jackie’s nerves. That’s also because most of them are pretty incompetent. And two of them, this can only happen in a Jackie Chan film, aren’t into it anyway, because they are actually ardent Jackie Chan fans and don’t want to fight their idol.
So a rather mild exchange of blows develops, in the course of which some Jackie highlights from his big hit films are reenacted in a rather tired and floppy way. Even Jackie Chan’s basically likeable self-irony can’t save the whole thing: he is plagued by all sorts of aches and pains, which is no surprise considering he is 70 years old. That’s why some of the action sequences are performed by stuntmen, something that was previously unthinkable, and Jackie is clearly wearing knee pads, which is also a no-no, and so on. The end is predictable: Of course the panda was actually supposed to be kidnapped for a good cause, but that doesn’t matter. The whole thing is so clumsy and uncharming that the sentimental final act seems even more contrived.
You could, with the greatest possible leniency, perhaps show the film to small children, but the beginning just doesn’t fit, and neither do some of the jokes made by a self-directed robot called Tony, who has apparently completely missed the MeToo movement. For adults, the film is simply a waste of time. The actors, apart from the two or three main characters, are at best stereotypes, who you even start to feel sorry for.
Technically, the film is okay, even if a lot of it is simply fake and the action is rather dull. It takes place mainly in a warehouse rather than in the zoo. That was probably easier to coordinate and to shoot. Action director Lu Shijia, who has been working with Jackie Chan since “Zodiac” (2012), can’t save anything either. And director Zhang Luan, who has hardly been known until now and is not much more than his star’s helpmate, certainly can’t either.
Jackie Chan, however, is undaunted. Eight of his projects are in various stages of completion, and even that lamentable “Panda Plan” is getting a sequel, which is scheduled to hit Chinese cinemas on October 1, 2025.
