Spion wider Willen

Talented star. Opaque plot. Murky dialog/translation. I will not add this film in my Jacky Chan collection. It's embarrassing.

The plot is impossibly murky. The dialog is heavy and clumsy. Characters come and go, and sometimes return, but there is no reason for any of it. If you see this film you will have no idea who is who, or what is going on. (Jacky, please have an English-speaking person write your English dialog!)

I suspect Jacky himself is to blame. Jacky is such a huge star, it must be difficult to reign in his enthusiasm or give him any kind of plot guidance.

This looks like an old Hong Kong film. I'm a big fan, so that's not an insult, but without the momentary laptop/internet scene, this easily could have been a 1980s Jacky film repackaged for the Western market. I can't see how that is a benefit.

The English translation may be at fault. I have many, many Chinese films in my collection, and this film was far below average. I'd prefer subtitles. Better yet, shoot the major dialog twice, in English and Cantonese. Jacky has done this with other films successfully. Besides, Jacky speaks English very well.

The locations were SUPER! I loved the lighting in places. Some good camera angles. The credits were heavy-handed but nice. A couple interesting stunts, but often shot poorly.

The American DVD was very disappointing. No extra material, at all! A terrible, old-looking photo. Again, everything points to a repackaged old film. Why make a new film like that?

I have 26 Jacky Chan films. This film would certainly rank as one of his least polished, exotic locations notwithstanding. It's no wonder it was never released in US theaters. Don't get me wrong, I hate Bret Ratner, the director of Rush Hour, but his stories made sense. By comparison, "Accidental Spy" is a home movie.

I cringe to see such a great star in such a shoddy film.

If one of the earlier reviewers is correct, then the Dimension release (which I saw) must have butchered a passable original, for I can't imagine Chan being in anything this poor. The Accidental Spy was beautifully photographed with some excellent fight and car-chase sequences, but whomever redid the dialogue for the English-language market had little idea of plot or continuity. The sound quality was additionally horrid, making the film even harder to follow.

Hopefully one of these days I'll get to see the Chinese original. In this form, The Accidental Spy fares very poorly in comparison with Police Story or Drunken Master II.

A worker in an athletic equipment store (Jackie Chan) saves the day when a robbery is going down. With a bit of fame, he attracts the attention of a dying Korean man who believes the hero is his long lost son. But, after traveling to Korea to meet with his supposed father, Jackie learns he may have a large bank account in Istanbul and his dad may have been involved in drug trafficking, too. Even as Jackie jets off to Turkey and fills a suitcase with his new bank-vault fortune, various groups of bad guys are out to get him. One of them dangles a beautiful young lady as bait for a trap. Will Jackie fall for it? Also, is the CIA involved in some respect? This is a fairly exciting movie which sports Jackie's patented and imaginative martial arts talent. Watching him get away from his pursuers by squirting shampoo in their eyes, among other things, is fun, no doubt about that. There is also a great scene in an open market where a disrobed Chan covers his vitals with tambourines and other handy items. Chuckle, chuckle. This dubbed film from the Hong Kong filmmakers also offers an excellent visual tour of Istanbul and its surroundings, something very rare and attractive. Jackie's castmates are well chosen, also, with two beautiful women gracing the screen for the viewers' vast enjoyment. If you love Chan movies, don't miss this one. Although it may not be his best work, it still has plenty of humor and action to keep the audience watching until the credits start to roll.

Jackie Chan's greatest weakness in his movies is predictability: you know the good triumphs over evil, the good guys are easy to identify, Jackie drop-kicks some butt, and he takes time to save kids and babies (not to mention babes, who sometimes save him). You know that if he gets the girl, he doesn't get very far (PG all the way).

In his best movies, this is his greatest strength, too: against the repeated backdrop of white and black hats, you're never quite sure how he's going to manage to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat. You know he's going to get cornered by 6 black hats with 18 weapons in some storage room...and somehow use whatever's stored there to do away with the evil-doers.

Unfortunately, in the Accidental Spy, we're not kept guessing very long. The fight scenes are overly predictable (and, too often, the victim of a punch will start rolling their head back before they're punched). The plot is as unimportant to the Jackie Chan machine as usual, but, unlike other movies of his, the characters aren't memorable. The love-interest is lovely, but not interesting. The spy-who-coulda-have-loved-Jackie is relegated to making plot-digressing phone calls ("did you order a helicopter?").

And it's too bad, because there's otherwise some good material here: drug kingpins and orphans, lost parents, competing spy agencies, and beautiful locations (especially those Istanbul and other parts of Turkey). It's too bad that his escape from a Turkish bathhouse is wasted in this movie (you try to confront a half-dozen apes with only your bath towel to save you...and then not even the towel).

The dubbing doesn't help. Instead of offering the film in its original Chinese with subtitles (easily possible in this digital age), we're stuck with dubbing that sucks away what little life remains in these two-dimensional characters.

I really like Chan's movies, but he could have phoned his performance in for this one. Chan, unfortunately, is missing from his own movie.

Except for one glaring error, I think Dimension Films did an excellent job in recutting/redubbing The Accidental Spy for the American Market. They didn't cut any major action sequences, the editing in general was better in the US version, and the actors who did the dubbing in the US version were 500% better than the ones who spoke English in the original (especially the woman who played Carmen--she had a gorgeous face, but her English was less convincing than Jackie's and she was a horrible actress to boot). Also, the new English dialog is MUCH better in Dimension's version, easily beating out the original's English dialoge as well as the subtitle translations of it's Cantonese and Turkish dialoge.

For instance, in an early scene where shop-clerk Jackie is demonstrating exercise equipment to a middle aged man and his hot young wife, the man becomes indignant over that attention Chan pays to his trophy spouse. In the original version, the translation of his complaint about Chan to the shop manager is "Is he a circus clown?" In the US version, he says, "Is he hitting on my wife?" which makes MUCH more sense (to americans anyway).

Of course, the most unusual thing about this re-edit is that Dimension gave the film an entirely different story! The original was about the chase for an ultra-lethal, weaponized pathogen called Anthrax II. Spy was set to come out right in the middle of our nation's big Anthrax scare, however, so that was out. In Dimension's remake, everyone is chasing after vials of a prototype drug 100 times more addictive than heroin. I say "six of one, half a dozen of the other." The chase is the important part in a Jackie Chan movie, not what everyone's running after. In fact, the drug plot works much better in many ways.

The only thing they messed up was the very end of the film--a common problem for Dimension (see the awkward end of the US version of Legend of Drunken Master). Spy's original ending was both bittersweet and comic. The US version's chopped up ending is just jarringly abrupt and the explanation of the plot is even more nonsensical than the HK version (oddly enough, the "simple" US-version explanation is more unbelievable than the convoluted version in the original.).

The Accidental Spy is Chan's best HK film in years--great cinematography, slick set design, great action! A class act, as these things go.