Jackie Chan has slowed down on the grueling stunts (Leave that shit for Tom Cruise to do) but he’s still out there cranking out action movies. The Hong Kong superstar stays busy stateside; he worked on The Lego Ninjago Movie, The Foreigner, and The Nut Job 2 domestically last year; but saves the most insane stuff for his home country. Such is definitely the case with the bonkers tech thriller, Bleeding Steel, which sounds like it should be one of Derek Zoolander’s famous “looks”.
I don’t know if anybody has played a heroic cop more than Chan, but he’s at it again in Bleeding Steel in which he squares off against a pissed off “super bio-warrior” played by Australian actor Callan Mulvey. I’d be pissed too if I looked like Patrick Stewart when part of the Borg collective.Yes, this is a Chinese/Australian co-production which makes for an interesting clash of styles. The action is clearly Hong Kong inspired and bordering on the surreal, while many of the locations are set in Sydney. You can spot the Sydney Opera House in one action sequence. There’s a lot of English dubbing, too, which is definitely a turn off if you’ve seen some of Chan’s recent domestic flicks.
The synopsis can do a better job of explaining the plot than I ever could: In an action-packed drama reminiscent of ’80s techno-sci-fi thrillers, Jackie Chan stars as Lin, a police inspector in modern Hong Kong. While tracking down a deranged, mecha-enhanced villain, Lin discovers that a geneticist’s lost bio-chemical invention has been surgically implanted into his missing daughter. With the help of a young hacker, Lin connects the dots between the device that haunts his daughter, his enemy’s sinister army, and a strange cultural phenomenon called Bleeding Steel.
Eh, alright. Directed by Leo Zhang, Bleeding Steel hits select theaters and VOD on July 6th.
