Move Review - The Foreigner

'The Foreigner' shows Jackie Chan in a more serious side...

  I went to see ‘The Foreigner’ starring Jackie Chan on Saturday afternoon with Kathy at the local Marshalltown theater where we were joined by five other patrons. I hadn’t seen any television ads for this film but there seemed to be ads for it before every YouTube video I watched over the last month. While I like watching Jackie Chan in action I’ve never cared for his movies which paint him as either the straight man in buddy movies like the ‘Rush Hour’ series or in ridiculous situations like ‘The Tuxedo’ or 'Legend of The Drunken Master’ that paint him as a martial arts idiot savant. The YouTube ads played up the notion of Jackie Chan as a man in pain out for vengeance with what looked like a lot of action without inane situations. Pierce Brosnan was shown to be the heavy of the piece as former IRA terrorist turned Irish politician Liam Hennessy that is the target of Chan’s quest to find his daughter’s murderers.

  The film doesn’t waste much of its two hours setting up the plot as it starts with Quan Ngoc Minh (Chan) picking up his daughter Fan from her London school and rushing across town to the store where all the ‘cool’ kids shop to get a dress for an upcoming dance. There is a big hurry because Fan is wired to the internet and knows that there are only two of the prized dresses left in her size. It’s a shame that Fan couldn’t have used her ‘dress app’ to reserve the dress since as soon as she enters the shop a bomb explodes, killing her along with dozens of others.

  A variant of the IRA claims credit for the bombing and there is political pressure on Brosnan to give up the bombers which he deflects by blaming a rogue element while bargaining for some IRA terrorist pardons in return for his cooperation. Quan is devastated and continually calls and visits the British agency investigating the bombing. Even though this agency has cameras everywhere and instant access to all sorts of information no one bothers to find out that Quan was a special forces operative who lost his wife and other two daughters escaping from Thailand. We don’t find this out until much later but we already knew that Quan had some training because after all this is Jackie Chan.

  Quan quickly traces down Hennessy as the man most likely to give him the names of his daughter’s killers and heads to Belfast to talk to him. Hennessy’s office also fails to check on Quan’s identity until after he plants a bomb in Hennessy’s office building even though he call has called and visited repeatedly . This leads to the meat of Chan’s action scenes. There is a battle in his rooming house that carries over to the neighboring rooftops and streets which lets Chan display some of his acrobatic moves but without the silliness of his other movies. After that Chan lays siege to Hennessy’s county house with a hunt in the woods reminiscent of the classic mountain scene in ‘First Blood’ from the Rambo series. Then there is a fight with Hennessy’s special forces nephew and the climactic battle in London with the murderers.

  There wasn’t the amount of action one would expect from an action movie but the action was intense in its bursts. Luckily the movie wasn’t just an action film but had the elements of a spy movie as Hennessy’s perfect little diplomatic life slowly unravels. He finds out that his wife is sleeping with his nephew and she betrayed his plans to trade the bombers for British pardons to the same IRA lieutenant that was working with Hennessy to plan the bombings in the first place. This lieutenant is responsible for subverting the targets from banks to civilians. And to add insult to injury the girl that Hennessy is cheating on his wife with is part of the terrorist cell that has been perpetrating the bombings.

  In addition to the action and spy movie elements ‘The Foreigner’ has some Big Brother\police drama themes as well. The London unit assigned to catch the terrorists does most of their work by cross referencing the all-encompassing camera shots with facial recognition software to come up with the name of one of the terrorists who lapses for a second and lets his face be seen by a camera when he drops his keys. The unit arrives at the terrorists flat en masse with swat teams, snipers, and a camera snaked through the air vent to see inside the apartment. At that point however, this supposedly elite unit falls on their face as Chan gains entry to the apartment as gas leak repairman without being seen visually or on camera. Then the swat team manages to arrive only after the climactic battle which allows them to torture one of the terrorists into giving up the location of a bomb that is meant to be planted on an airplane.

  Aside from the police turning from elite unit to keystone cops to elite unit as needed, ‘The Foreigner’ was a tight and entertaining film. Switching from action movie to spy movie to police work is hard to pull off but the film managed to seamlessly integrate all three genres. Chan gave a great performance as the tortured Quan. Chan could show pain at losing his family without descending into pointless angst but was also able to be an action star without turning into a joker or mindless killing machine. Brosnan was workmanlike as the part terrorist part con-man Hennessy. Brosnan was most effective showing the ruthless aspects of the character and seemed to struggle showing the inherent weakness of the character as he spirals downward. The best of the supporting characters was Hennessy’s wife Mary (Orla Brady) and right hand man McGrath (Dermot Crowley) who are the major actors in plotting his demise.

  This was a fine movie and gave me a whole new slant on Jackie Chan as a serious actor. The film was also a financial success despite only 7 people attending the Saturday matinee in Marshalltown with $12 million in the opening US weekend and over $100 million overall for a $35 million budget. Hopefully Chan will spend his twilight years with this sort of film instead of Rush Hour sequels.