“Jackie Chan is 55. Just sayin’. He no longer runs up walls by using the leverage of a perpendicular surface. Back in the days before CGI, he used to really do that. OK, maybe some wires were involved, but you try running up a two-story wall with wires. I wouldn’t even want to be winched up.”
Roger Ebert
That was in 2010. Today, not just walls but most any other surface, perpendicular and otherwise, is computer-generated. Even, for that matter, stuff you might not think of as a surface — like, you know, the fucking sky. There’s something here called the “Highway of Death,” but a more fitting name would have been the ‘CGI-way of Death.’ Aside from that (which for me is already a deal breaker), Hidden Strike is not unlike many another Jackie Chan movie you may have seen before, this time with John Cena following in the footsteps of Chris Tucker, Owen Wilson, and Johnny Knoxville as Chan’s laidback, wisecracking American sidekick. The only difference is that Cena is fluent in Mandarin, making this Odd Couple less odd than it could have, and perhaps should have, been.
Come to think of it, though, this isn’t exactly a by-the-numbers Jackie Chan flick so much as it is a Mad Max knock-off filtered through Chan’s (and, to a certain extent, Cena’s) family-friendly brand of action-adventure, which means there is a lot of conceited smart-mouthing masquerading as comedy — a specialty of Cena; for example, his character posits that “Nicknames are like the heart of team camaraderie,” and claims that “nicknames are like my superpower,” but then the best that he can come up with is “Bald Eagle,” “Toothpick,” “Tomb Raider,” “Tramp Stamp,” and “Etch-a-Sketch.” Now, we’re supposed to find it hilarious that Etch-a-Sketch keeps reminding Cena that his name is actually Knox.
In general, Cena is an acquired taste who can outstay his welcome at the drop of a hat, which is the case here. Back in the WWE, there’s no doubt that Cena could be great on the mic when he wanted to be, but one of the biggest gripes about his persona was that, more often than not, everything was a fuking joke to the guy. His Chris Van Horne in Hidden Strike is no different. Consider this: Chris is forced against his better judgment to join a mercenary raid with his brother, so that he can raise the $100,000 needed to bribe the Evil Corporation whose dam has cut off the water supply to the rural village where Chris is the local White Savior (all of this supposedly takes place in Iraq but was shot on location in China; makes little difference either way, though, considering that the movie is wall-to-wall green screens).
Yada yada yada the raid doesn’t go quite as planned, Chris gets screwed out of the money, his brother is killed, and the village “is gonna die without water” — and still this musclebound doofus simply cannot bring himself to stop cracking wise. And it’s not even a defense mechanism, like the dude is outwardly laughing off his brother’s death but is grieving on the inside, and will eventually come to grips with his loss and openly mourn it — hell no! The character will remain a one-dimensional, walking punchline all the way through. Comparatively, Chan’s own familial melodrama involving her estranged daughter fares a little better; after all, neatly packaged closure is still closure.
As for the interaction between Cena and Chan, since their characters don’t initially see eye to eye, you’re kinda looking forward to their inevitable showdown, even if you know with a certainty approaching dread that it will inevitably resolve itself into a cop-out without a clear winner — but as it turns out, it’s actually worse than that. I mean, I wasn’t expecting John Cena vs. Jackie Chan to be Vin Diesel vs. Dwayne Johnson Pt. II, but I didn’t expect it either to be a handicap match pitting Cena against Chan (in close-ups) and Chan’s stunt double (in wide shots). The fight ends up looking more edited than choreographed, with plenty of unrealistic spots — and not in the old, Jackie Chan-makes-it-look-easy way; more like the old Jackie Chan-makes-it-look-fake way (for the record, I don’t object to the fact that Jackie’s getting on in years, but perhaps now would be a good time to adopt a Mr. Miyagi-esque fighting style).
Elsewhere, there are individual moments that may remind you of such past action classics as The Rock and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; specifically and respectively, the “It’s you. You’re the rocket man” scene and the climax of the tank chase — and by ‘remind you,’ I mean make you long for the good old days when even a Michael Bay movie had jokes that actually hit the mark, and a literal cliffhanger truly carried suspense and excitement. All things considered, Hidden Strike should have stayed hidden.