THE MYTH
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Cast: Jackie Chan, Kim Hee-seo, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Mallika Sherawat, Ken Lo
Director: Stanley Tong
Now on DVD from Sony Pictures

In 2004, after a string of Hollywood disappointments, Jackie Chan returned to Hong Kong and made the dark, violent thriller New Police Story. Low on comedy and stunts and high on drama, the film featured an impressive performance by Chan and was his best movie since Drunken Master II in 1994. For admirers of Chan, this was good news, but hopes of a Jackie Chan renaissance were short-lived. His follow-up film, The Myth, was a lackluster affair. When it played at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival as, astonishingly, a Gala Presentation, critics were unanimously unenthusiastic. Despite moderately successful box office in Asia, it is only now making its official North American release – two years later, heavily edited, and dumped direct-to-DVD.

The American film buffs that discovered Chan through bootleg videos in the 1980s liked that his films were unpolished and had rough edges. The Myth, in contrast, is pure moviemaking-by-committee. It feels like Chan and company wrote the script based on how many of their desired markets they could appeal to. The film has two parallel plots, one set in the 225 B.C.E. China (thank you, Google) and starring Chan as a humble general who falls in love with the princess he is protecting. This section, which is mostly dramatic, is clearly modeled after Zhang Yimou’s martial arts extravaganzas, particularly Hero. In the film’s other storyline, Chan is a bumbling archaeologist (embarrassingly named “Professor Jack Chan”) who begins to suspect that he may be the bodyguard re-incarnated. This section, with its broad comedy and silly chase scenes, might as well be Armour of God 3. The two halves, which mix like oil and water, are united in a curious special-effects dependant climax. To cover one more market, several Indian scenes are thrown into the mix, with Bollywood star Mallika Sherawat wasted in a throwaway role.

What a mess this movie is. Either one of the parallel stories could have made for an entertaining movie, but combined they suggest that director Stanley Tong couldn’t decide which direction he wanted to go with the movie.

The whole of The Myth is pretty terrible, but in parts it’s quite enjoyable. The period scenes, while not especially memorable, have a fairly strong dramatic performance by Chan. Chan has been saying in recent years that he’d like to move away from action and towards drama, and this, coupled with his work in New Police Story, make one wish he’d make good on his promise. The modern-day scenes have a couple of vintage Chan moments, including a very funny fight on a mousetrap assembly line that belongs with Chan’s best set pieces.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the version I have seen is the original 118-minute Chinese cut, which I bought in Chinatown. The version being released by Sony has been drastically reduced to 95-minutes, mostly to eliminate a lot of the violence and ensure a more family-friendly PG-13 rating - could this be the Magnificent Ambersons of Jackie Chan films? I haven’t seen the Sony cut, but folks, there’s only so much time I’m willing to devote to The Myth. As the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Between the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and The Myth’s belated DVD premiere, Chan has made two movies – the equally disappointing Rob-B-Hood and the downright dreary Rush Hour 3. New Police Story indicated an exciting new direction in Chan’s career, but the steps he’s been taking since then have not been encouraging.

RED ROAD
Rating: *** ½ (out of ****)
Cast: Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Nathalie Press, Andrew Armour
Director: Andrea Arnold

Red Road reportedly stems from an idea by the Danish director Lars von Trier (Dogville), who conceived it as the first film in a projected trilogy in which three first-time directors will each create a different story about the same central characters, all set in Scotland and filmed under von Trier’s notorious Dogme 95 rules (i.e., natural light, handheld cameras, etc.). Red Road, the first entry of this experiment, was shown at Cannes in 2006, where it received rave reviews and won the Jury Prize. It picked up a shelf full of other awards, including Best Actress at the British Independent Film Awards, where Kate Dickie had a surprise victory over Helen Mirren.

In North America, Red Road played only a limited theatrical engagement earlier this year (including one week at the Royal in Toronto), and box office returns were modest, but it has been released by Tartan Films on DVD, hopefully to find a wider audience.

Jackie (Dickie) is a surveillance camera operator who sees Clyde (Curran) on one of her monitors. Clyde looks familiar, and Jackie reluctantly (and I would say clumsily) begins stalking him, until they ultimately develop a relationship that could turn sexual. Red Road has been likened to the work of director Michael Haneke (Cache, Funny Games), and that is an apt comparison. As with Haneke, director/co-writer Andrea Arnold favours minimalism, and there are times while watching the film where the audience feels like voyeurs – indeed, as if we were watching Jackie’s surveillance recordings.

Shrewdly, we are not told until near the end what Jackie’s connection with Clyde is, and their back-stories are only slowly explained, enhancing the film’s palpable air of unease and morbid curiosity. The film’s slow-burn structure is genuinely fascinating and disturbing, building up tension slowly and powerfully. And it all leads to a sex scene shocking not only for its explicitness but also for the suppressed emotions it suggests.

I think the film stumbles slightly in its concluding scenes, which struck me as too “feel-good” to mesh with the preceding material. Still, when the preceding material is so excellently crafted, it’s hard to complain. The next two films of Lars von Trier’s brainchild have a lot to live up to.