great | Jackie Chan Is Prisoner [VHS]

VHS: Jackie Chan Is Prisoner [VHS] | Jackie Chan, Andy Lau

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	• Jackie Chan Is Prisoner [VHS] Jackie Chan, Andy Lau Sony Pictures, 2001 view larger image
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Jackie Chan's great bit part

This movie followed the typical 'jail house' plot line with both a cop and a gangster's murderer on the inside forming an unspoken, unportrayed alliance. The cinemography was average for a high budget martial arts flick (better than I expected it to be), and there is a delightful selection of great actors present. The title is quite misleading, as Jackie Chan may well be the least represented of the big names, and it left me wondering for the first 15 minutes if the publisher confused actors, as it took about that long for his first appearance. That being said, a change of title would likely raise the average rating of this movie, and I could see it easily gaining 3.5-4 stars.

As alluded to earlier, Jackie Chan's roll in this movie is really something of a bit part. He has maybe a dozen lines of dialogue, and three fight scenes to my recollection (not counting the shoot-out). His total screen time is probably about 30 minutes.
The discrepency of the title dealt with, the coreography is fairly good (though not on a par with Jackie's other movies), and the acting is convincing an enjoyable. The plot seems to get forgotten at times, and the direction seems a bit confused between trying to be an action flick and an emotional flick without giving enough screen time to either to satisfy. The dubbing sounds to be performed by native English speakers, and has some colorful dialogue.. unfortunately, the voices were not well chosen to match the actors they represented.

All in all, I enjoyed this movie once I got over the part where I was trying to figure out how Jackie Chan tied into the story. Though the fight scenes do display some enjoyable martial arts, I would be quite hesitant to call this a martial arts movie; similarly, while there are several action scenes, I also doubt I would call this an action movie. Ultimately, it seemed to be a movie without focus... foruntately, the actors carried it and you are able to get engrossed just by watching the antics on a moment-by-moment basis.

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great

i thought this was a great movie as the sceme gets deeper , i liked it alot as jacky chan was not the main character in the film but a host of characters put together make this a great film

Though Jackie Chan is billed as the star of The Prisoner, he's actually part of a stellar ensemble cast including Sammo Hung (Dragons Forever, TV's Martial Law), Andy Lau (Saviour of the Soul), and Tony Leung Ka-fai (The Lover). Leung plays a cop who goes undercover in a prison to dig out corruption; Hung is a roustabout prisoner who keeps breaking out to see his son; Chan plays a pool shark who accidentally kills a gambler; and Lau is that gambler's mob boss brother who's sworn to kill Chan. They all end up in the same prison, resulting in a complex, engrossing, and sometimes brutal story--think of it as the Hong Kong version of HBO's Oz. Which is not to say it isn't full of the bizarre narrative shifts that make Hong Kong movies such a perverse pleasure: Chan got into a fight with this gambler because he was trying to raise money to buy his dying girlfriend a black-market liver; at one point, Hung escapes and takes his son to the park, where they buy cotton candy and have some quality time; and at the end the whole movie takes a bizarre lurch into John Woo-style gunplay spectacle. This isn't a criticism--this crazy quilt of emotional tones and genres adds to the movie's entertainment value without detracting from the emotional power of some gripping scenes of prison conflict. For new Jackie Chan fans who've seen his American movies and want to learn more about why he's one of the biggest stars in the world, this is probably not the right place to start; but for anyone looking to experience more of one of the world's most exuberant and engaging bodies of cinema, The Prisoner offers jolting fights and hairpin twists and turns. --Bret Fetzer

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