The Sunday Mail
Film Review
Tinashe Kusema
IT feels like a lifetime ago since I first bumped into the trailer of Netflix’s new action–comedy “Hidden Strike”.
However, like many other movie fans, I was excited at the prospect of seeing Jackie Chan and wrestler-cum-actor John Cena team up on the big screen.
The two are some of my favourite actors, albeit under completely different categories. For the most part, the trailer looked promising.
While an odd pairing — one not many could have seen coming — each of them has an impressive resume in the action-comedy genre, and there was no reason to doubt that this could actually work.
That was some two or three months ago.
Now, the excitement has been replaced by utter disappointment.
Under normal circumstances, “Hidden Strike” is one of those flicks that hardly deserves to appear in this column, but it has recently been brought to my attention such that I am fast earning the reputation of being that one film critic who either loves everything or simply tries to sugar-coat bad movies. It is one of my many reputations, apparently! But this time around, I am going to call a spade a spade.
“Hidden Strike” follows Lou Feng (Chan) as he is entrusted with extracting workers from a Middle East oil refinery and transporting them across the Baghdad desert and into the peaceful green zone.
When a group of mercenaries kidnaps a few of his passengers — including the refinery chief engineer, Professor Cheng (Jiang Wenli), who possesses the key codes to release the oil — Feng is forced to team up with a former special forces soldier, Chris Van Horne, who has his own beef and connection with the gang. The two set out to rescue the hostages and stop this group and their leader, Owen Paddock (Pilou Asbaek), from committing the biggest oil heist in history.
Complicating their mission is the presence of Feng’s estranged daughter, Mei (Chunrui Ma), and Van Horns’ divided priorities between rescuing the hostages and exacting his revenge on the man (Paddock) who killed his brother. There is nothing new or revolutionary about the film’s main plot.
The coming together of Chan and Cena’s characters takes way too long, and, worse still, the two demonstrate very little chemistry. Arash Amel, who penned the screenplay, sacrifices character development for cheap laughs, and does not really give the film’s two leads any relative material.
For instance, Feng’s strained relationship with his daughter and the death of Van Horne’s father and brother play a huge part on who these characters are, but, for some reason, both these storylines do not get much attention, apart from the odd reference.
The movie’s main antagonist, Owen Paddock, hardly gets any screen time — let alone meaningful dialogue — and could have served a better purpose as a background character or extra.
We do not get much pertaining to his motives (aside from the obvious greed), backstory or any meaningful story to care about his downfall.
In fact, the only thing the movie does right is the odd laugh, here and there, as well as great action and fight sequences.
The film is a collaborative effort between the United States and China, and has all the hallmarks of a typical Jackie Chan movie. These include great fight sequences and stunts, most of which are performed by Jackie Chan himself and the bloopers and gag reel during the appearance of the film’s credits. I found it a bit weird that the bloopers and gag reel are a lot funnier than the material that made the final cut, with both Chan and Cena showing a lot more comedy chops and chemistry.
