The Myth

The Myth is the latest Jackie Chan action-adventure flick set in both modern and ancient China and India. Typical for a Jackie Chan film it features quite a few ridiculous, and often hilarious, fight scenes featuring stunts from the man himself. Overall the movie isn't as good as his old works such as Project A, Drunken Master or Police Story but it's still fairly entertaining.

The plot is quite contrived, as you might expect, but in places it's just downright stupid. One of the central parts of the movie is that there are pieces of meteorite that project light rays capable of creating an anti-gravity field. We are introduced to this topic by a very scientific talk about how rapidly rotating objects weigh less. Yes, the physicist in me was screaming in agony during this movie. Personally , I don't know why they bothered to waste our time with some pseudo-science to explain the levitation effect as the only it's in there is to provide some justification to the (literally) gravity-defying fight scene at the end.

Aside from the stupid story elements, which you can largely ignore, the film doesn't actually have that much fighting in it. Nor does it have many stunts. The fight scenes that are there seem to alternate between Jackie's traditional small-scale, hand-to-hand combats and larger military battles. These just weren't as good as the smaller fights, perhaps because I have higher expectations from those kinds of battles. I should mention that there aren't many combat scenes compared to the overall length of the movie; for a shorter film there would have been quite a lot.

I think that was one of the main problems I had with The Myth – it just went too long for the content it had. At roughly 2 hours it actually crawls through some areas that could have been mostly left out. His journey through India is mostly useless, although it does get in a nice sword fight and an old-school Jackie Chan fight on a conveyor belt covered in glue. A sticky situation indeed (sorry, I had to say it). Maybe it was due to the length and pacing but I felt that the movie was trying to be a Jackie Chan version of [The Mummy][5] and just didn't succeed. Whilst the fights were funny and entertaining, the stuff in between was mostly boring. The dialogue was poor, there wasn't any real humour and explanations of the "science" set my teeth on edge.

The movie isn't actually crap or anything – as I've said the traditional zany martial arts action is still there and it's about as good as previous films. Aside from that there's not much that's a positive, but then you don't exactly see a Jackie Chan film for the in-depth character analysis or anything. If you're a Jackie fan or action movie buff then you'll likely enjoy this. If you're the mood for some escapism or a "throw away" film experience then it's also a good choice. Otherwise I suggest waiting until you're with friends and drinking so you can have fun laughing at the silly plot in between the cool fight scenes.

[5]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120616/