Jackie Chan's character in this and his previous film with Owen Wilson, is named Chon Wang. Wilson's Ray O'Bannon pegged him in 2000 as a Chinese John Wayne. So when he calls his name in this film, it sounds very much like John Wayne. And, that remains the funniest thing in this second pairing of the two actors. Chan and Wilson play two sidekicks whose "click" is fast fading.
This film has a little humor in the plot by introducing two characters of history from England. One could guess the first one right away. Tom Fisher plays a Scotland Yard inspector, Artie Doyle. That's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author who created the character Sherlock Holmes who became England's most famous sleuth in a series of novels and short stories. In real life, Doyle was a medical doctor before his writing career - not a Scotland Yard detective. The second historical character is the young boy, Charlie, whom those who hadn't already guessed would be revealed in the end as Charles Chaplin. With the movie set in 1887, the real Charlie Chaplin of film fame wasn't yet born. A young Aaron Johnson plays Charlie.
Those little fictional insertions of a couple of famous names are the extent of humor in this action comedy. And, as some others have noted, by this time in his career, Jackie Chan is no longer the karate or Kungfu master who is unrivaled. He has to be rescued a couple times by someone else. He gets captured a couple of times, and is injured three times and clearly beaten in his final martial arts contest with the villain, Lord Nelson Rathbone, played by Aidan Gillen.
The screenplay for this film is a jumbled mess, with smaller plots in three locations tossed together. The script is full of holes, and it comes off as more hokey than any kind of action thriller. Chan was still making money on his films, but the declining net earnings was matching the declining quality of his movies.
This film has a little humor in the plot by introducing two characters of history from England. One could guess the first one right away. Tom Fisher plays a Scotland Yard inspector, Artie Doyle. That's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author who created the character Sherlock Holmes who became England's most famous sleuth in a series of novels and short stories. In real life, Doyle was a medical doctor before his writing career - not a Scotland Yard detective. The second historical character is the young boy, Charlie, whom those who hadn't already guessed would be revealed in the end as Charles Chaplin. With the movie set in 1887, the real Charlie Chaplin of film fame wasn't yet born. A young Aaron Johnson plays Charlie.
Those little fictional insertions of a couple of famous names are the extent of humor in this action comedy. And, as some others have noted, by this time in his career, Jackie Chan is no longer the karate or Kungfu master who is unrivaled. He has to be rescued a couple times by someone else. He gets captured a couple of times, and is injured three times and clearly beaten in his final martial arts contest with the villain, Lord Nelson Rathbone, played by Aidan Gillen.
The screenplay for this film is a jumbled mess, with smaller plots in three locations tossed together. The script is full of holes, and it comes off as more hokey than any kind of action thriller. Chan was still making money on his films, but the declining net earnings was matching the declining quality of his movies.