Looking for Jackie

I love Jackie Chan as an actor, so I was pretty psyched to pick this one up at Redbox. I thought I was in for some awesome Jackie Chan action.. Boy, was I wrong. Putting Jackie Chan in big letters across the title and even having him on the cover is pretty much false advertising.

The whole movie is about some whiny kid who looks for Jackie, finds him (Jackie gets about 5 minutes of screen time), and then the movie ends. Out of all the movies I've ever watched, I'd place it in the bottom 5. It's that bad.

Save your dollar for something else.

Originally and more accurately titled Looking For Jackie, this 2009 Chinese family comedy has been retitled for its UK release in a cynical attempt to cash-in on Jackie Chan's recent Karate Kid remake. But with little screen time for the martial arts legend, does the film offer enough elsewhere to placate fans angry at being duped into picking up this DVD?

A little research shows that Jackie Chan & The Kung Fu Kid was certainly a hit at the domestic box office, setting a new record for local children and family friendly productions. The film is not unwatchable and there is some ironic fun to be had, mostly due to its stiff lipped and po-faced tone. However, for anyone expecting to see much of Jackie Chan, martial arts action in general, or even an engaging 'rights of passage' tale about one boy's journey into manhood, will be left disappointed. PD

I think the thing throwing people off here is the title. The original Chinese title is "Looking for Jackie Chan" which does describe the plot of the movie. That being said, there is only a little bit of Jackie Chan in this movie. But come on, a movie can be plenty good with other people.

This is just the story of a really dorky kid looking for his idol. It's fun, has just a touch of fantasy and a lot of silliness. Sure, it has some quaint morality themes in it, but none of those stop this from being a fun family movie, the kind of thing that was so much fun to watch when I was a kid. Watch it, enjoy it, and stop being such a pretentious person just because it doesn't have that much Chan in it.

I think I understand what the movie is about and what the directors were trying to get at. They wanted to show that the Kung Fu you see in movies is fake. That the actors are doing a form of it, but no one is really getting hurt. That the future is not about fighting, but about learning. They used Jackie Chan in the film because he is such a big star. He had very little scenes in the movie though. The movie was mostly about a boy who says that Jackie Chan is his hero. That he wants to go to China to find him so he can become he disciple and learn to basically beat up people. The kid learns a life lesson in this movie and that is pretty much what makes up the excitement of the movie. The music used in the movie is something you would hear out of a Saturday morning special. The actor was barely at par. Jackie Chan acted good, but again, he didn't have much of a role in a film that has his name written in hug letters. The poster of the film is very misleading, making viewers think it is a new Jackie Chan fighting movie. I believe it was done to get people to see the message of it all, but in return, it made viewers give pretty bad reviews. When I watched it, I realized what they did, but I was still going to watch the movie as a whole and rate it as I would any movie. Unfortunately, the movie was not that good at all and was lacking in many areas.

Obey your elders and grandmother, obey the police, learn Chinese as well as official Chinese history, go from the "periphery" (Chinese diaspora or Hongkong) to the "centre" Bejing to properly fit in. Don't follow skateboard, own thought or other strange things. No own will, we're Chinese!

Begin of the plot: A young kid is bullied by his peers on a Chinese school in Indonesia. He dreams about Cheng Long aka Jackie Chan and gets frenetical about him. Thus he follows him to Bejing, even with low knowledge of written Chinese etc.

Will this fervour make him disciple of Jackie Chan's at the end?

Utterly bad Communist Party agitprop playing a nationalist card to kinsmen abroad. The 2 stars are only for some freckles of irony and choreography. Waste of time.