The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison is disappointed by Jackie Chan in THE SHADOW'S EDGE (Larry Yang, China 2025)

It’s a bit like the Paul Hogan in Australia story, a genuine international movie star and his home industry has no idea what to do with him. Jackie Chan is well on the way to being the most famous actor of all time but, since his return to Mainland China, his films have been dispiriting. The new Bu Feng Zhui Ying / The Shadow's Edge offered hope. It has been a hit, running in Sydney for a month where Feng Xiaogang’s (much better) We Girls scraped through a week. Jackie is front and center doing what he was famous for - kicking ass - and it is a big production aimed at the international market. It comes directed & written by Larry Yang, who handled Jackie in the horse picture Ride On, which I never got around to.  With action now broken into edits, his film has a more contemporary style than the sustained full-body shots that made the seventies HK material go. Ingenious staging, moving camera and rapid cutting show more accomplished technique than most of the Asian film I see.

The opening impresses with best ‘Scope production values and the luxurious Macao Wynn Tower Casino setting, where new generation bad hats use their costume quick changes and parkour, backed by the latest computer skills, to do a major cryptocurrency robbery, taking out the territory’s police communications system in the process and escaping on parachute gliders.  Reviewing the security camera footage at HQ, the cops have to admit that their own electronic skills are not equal to the challenge. Time to call in the retired commander whose legendary use of live surveillance personnel will not be compromised by the new menace of AI. Guess who?

Jackie, is still a mover but looks his seventy years. He shows up, immediately circles details on their wall of screens display and agrees to form his own dedicated unit, rejecting , with a handshake, members of the line of  Policia Macao recruits offered for the project, saying they look too much like cops.  We notice diminutive Zhang Zifeng among the officers selected. So far so good but at this point they start filling in back stories at great and not particularly interesting length.

Zhang Zifeng, The Shadow's Edge

Zifeng ’s dad Yu Rongguang was killed in a surveillance where he was Jackie’s partner. She takes a dim view of being the one left in the van after getting coffee - plot stream about female equality. Turns out that they are up against The Shadow, an equally senior knife wielding master, who beats up his own young recruits for not preventing his photo being taken for the first time in his life of crime. Stare hard and you recognise the now mature Big Tony Ka Fai Leung from Golden Age Hong Kong productions like Ringo Lam’s Gam yuk fung wan/Prison on Fire or Tsui Hark’s San lung moon hak chan / Dragon Inn.

The exercise becomes getting Solid Intel without Tony knowing, to make it possible to recover the massive crypto loss. Jackie’s imitation street people operatives converge on the bleak wall of apartment buildings, after a pursuit through a produce market where Zifeng hits on searching under a stall with her phone light to avoid being spotted.

The film’s most successful scene (it is often picked out in reviews) is the friendly and chatty home cooked meal the two veterans share, bolstered by the tension from them being likely to start hitting one another with sharp furniture after any false move. However the film goes on forever ( two and a half hours of forever) so that the final sustained battle with the stars crashing through the cafe roof, arrives too late to perk up interest.  While the technique may be state of the art, writing does not match it.

into his 70s, Jackie Chan, The Shadow's Edge

The Shadow’s Edge comes with the now obligatory final out -take compilation - nice bit where everyone, including the girl athlete she's been fighting, congratulates actress Zifeng on the action she's just managed. Jackie makes a point of having a second camera on him when the stunt car flips to within feet of where he’s been standing. He includes a shot where he declares he’ll be doing this for another twenty years. I’m inclined to believe it and ignore the fact that he once told me he didn’t want to be a sixty year old action hero like Clint Eastwood.

He may not be up for crashing down three storey buildings or being dragged behind city busses anymore but his comic timing is still impeccable. It would be nice to see his industry find a worthwhile use for that.