Bleeding Steel (Leo Zhang)

[Stay Puft]

BLEEDING STEEL
Dir. Leo Zhang



IMDb page

[Stay Puft]

Jackie Chan tackles sci-fi to predictably mixed results. Like every other blockbuster being pumped out of China, the screenplay is a cluttered, poorly assembled mess of incongruous ideas that barely even makes the effort to have its plot threads hang together. The inciting incidents (involving a literary author and a hypnotist) are baffling, and the movie hurries so quickly through the scenes leading into the whiz-bang finale that you can practically see the director on the other side of the screen begging you not to stop and think about how any of this makes logical sense. Whatever, everybody is on a giant flying fortress now. And that's the other thing about Bleeding Steel: the villain has a giant flying fortress, and Jackie Chan dons some whack sci-fi gear (the production design is somewhere between Mass Effect and Tron: Legacy, and fucking terrible) and unleashes martial arts mayhem on super soldiers, and it's kind of awesome. There is some legitimately good action in this, from the explosive opening shootout (almost entirely done with practical effects) to the aforementioned flying fortress climax (lots of digital effects here, obviously), to a fun chase sequence involving Chan and his opponent doing battle on top of the Sydney Opera House. That last one in particular conjures the Jackie Chan spirit of old, and there are a lot of fun callbacks to Chan's long career throughout the film. Chan's eagerness and sincerity when it comes to entertaining his audience is joyous and makes it all work, even as he's using wires or green screens or what have you and we're all sitting here acknowledging that his best films are mostly behind him. I can't really recommend it or say it's a good film, but it's just silly enough, and some of the action as I said is just stylish and hard-hitting enough, to provide some good entertainment.

Also, I can promise you there are things in this movie you have never seen in a Jackie Chan film before, most notably [

Show Spoiler

Chan losing an arm, and then growing a new arm thanks to super regenerative magic science DNA, and using his new super arm to rip out the bad guy's heart with his bare hand, complete with a gory close-up of an exploding chest cavity and everything

]. Seriously, if you love Jackie Chan and have any interest in seeing the movie, don't click the spoiler. Just go see it and let it wash over you in its nonsensical glory.