Before going into the cinema I was expecting some sort of a Rumble in the Bronx type of story but substitute the Bronx with Tokyo and swap the black and latino gangsters with the yakuza and you have Shinjuku Incident since after all, this is a Jackie Chan movie. I was wrong which was good... sort of.
This movie have zero stunts. No kungfu and zero action. In this movie, Jackie acts as an illegal (kungfu-less) Chinese immigrant who "sneaked" into Japan to find out his girlfriend's whereabouts and is caught up in a Yakuza civil war. Usually a typical Japanese will put Jackie in a wrong place at a wrong time and you will have him running around the whole of Tokyo and the movie ends with Jackie catching the top crook. But this ain't your typical Jackie Chan movie.
Instead of heading straight into the "wrong place wrong time" scenario immediately, we were shown how hard the lives of the illegal Chinese immigrants are. How they band together into a slum like environment and how this small community strives hard to survive in such a foreign environment and how they were drawn into a middle of an ongoing Yakuza civil war which actually turns out to be between a mix of Young and Dangerous and The Godfather.
What I like about this movie, is how for once Jackie is playing out of his usual goody-two-shoes accidental hero or superhuman cop character and jumped into a more down-to-earth kungfu-less chap and also how they try to make a Jackie Chan vehicle movie into an Asian gangster flick. The story is quite decent but when it reaches to the second half of the movie, plot holes began to show up at a rapid-fire rate. The cinematography is excellent and some scenes which is so nicely taken that it almost let you forget about the plotholes in the story. And last but not least the acting is very solid. I mean after all the whole cast is made up of veteran actors which could act without effort at any given time.
Instead of heading straight into the "wrong place wrong time" scenario immediately, we were shown how hard the lives of the illegal Chinese immigrants are. How they band together into a slum like environment and how this small community strives hard to survive in such a foreign environment and how they were drawn into a middle of an ongoing Yakuza civil war which actually turns out to be between a mix of Young and Dangerous and The Godfather.
What I like about this movie, is how for once Jackie is playing out of his usual goody-two-shoes accidental hero or superhuman cop character and jumped into a more down-to-earth kungfu-less chap and also how they try to make a Jackie Chan vehicle movie into an Asian gangster flick. The story is quite decent but when it reaches to the second half of the movie, plot holes began to show up at a rapid-fire rate. The cinematography is excellent and some scenes which is so nicely taken that it almost let you forget about the plotholes in the story. And last but not least the acting is very solid. I mean after all the whole cast is made up of veteran actors which could act without effort at any given time.
Time to play Spot the Familiar Faces from this picture
Other than the (second half of the) story, the pacing of the movie is something that I have big issues with. The story started of at a slow pace which was good as they used the characters to slowly buildup the story (kinda like GTA 4 only without the annoying cousin). Just when the buildup began to build momentum, the director slows things down again which kind of kill off all the buildup that the director had so painstakingly build. Then there are some parts of the movie which happened just like that with zero buildup which kinda totally kills my interests when the movie reaches the two thirds mark.
So what's my final verdict of this movie? A decent 6.8 out of 10. This movie could easily be Jackie Chan's chance to cement his reputation as a "serious" actor but unfortunately a classic this movie is not. Too many plot holes and bad pacing had spoiled what could be a movie of both technical and scriptwriting brilliance.
P/S: If only one of the assasination scnes could be as cool as the Godfather's "Baptism of Fire" scene I would had easily give this flick a 7.
So what's my final verdict of this movie? A decent 6.8 out of 10. This movie could easily be Jackie Chan's chance to cement his reputation as a "serious" actor but unfortunately a classic this movie is not. Too many plot holes and bad pacing had spoiled what could be a movie of both technical and scriptwriting brilliance.
P/S: If only one of the assasination scnes could be as cool as the Godfather's "Baptism of Fire" scene I would had easily give this flick a 7.
