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[series:1758#628] | ||||||
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(Rent- or Watch+) This seems to have been made in pre-1999 Hong Kong, as it had language available in either Mandarin or Cantonese (but not Japanese), and subtitles in either traditional or simplified Chinese (or English). I was a little surprised when, at the very beginning, the makers dared to display sketches of the manga/anime versions of the characters, since Jackie Chan looks nothing like that version of Ryo. It soon became clear that they were taking a rather tongue-in-cheek attitude to the production of this film. It starts off with a quick introduction to Ryo and Kaori, and how they teamed up, played for laughs. They definitely had Ryo's correct make and model of car! And it was funny--I wasn't really able to suspend disbelief and accept this short and not extremely muscular man as the Ryo I love, but he is definitely a good comedian. This movie was more about Jackie Chan than Ryo Saeba. There's a lot of his trademark slapstick action-comedy, especially the scenes in the theater and video arcade. I was left cringing at times at the amount of punishment Jackie seemed to absorb, enough to kill an ordinary man several times over. It gets kinda violent, as the criminals display an irrational homicidal streak towards the hostages. There was an instance of Ryo's incredible skill at shooting guns out of people's hands, played as a joke--someone who wasn't familiar with the genre might not have realised just how funny that was. Of course everything works out OK. Once the crisis has passed the characters behave in a more City Hunter-like manner to wrap things up. My impression was that a conscious effort was being made to mimic the original manga/anime versions at the start and at the end, whereas the bulk of the movie was mostly Jackie-chan style action-comedy. If this hadn't been fun in and of itself I might have been disappointed; but since it is, I'm not. Rent if you're a City Hunter fan, Watch if you're not Last updated Monday, January 14 2008. Created Monday, January 14 2008. | ||||||||
