The Medallion (2003)
Work through enough of Jackie Chan's vast filmography, as I have been steadily doing, and you start to notice two careers running side by side: the astonishing Hong Kong run that built his name, and the patchier Western-facing vehicles that followed once Hollywood came calling. The Medallion sits squarely, and unhappily, in the second camp.
Directed by Gordon Chan, it casts Jackie as a Hong Kong detective who, in the course of chasing a smuggler, becomes entangled with a mystical medallion and the supernatural powers it confers. That's roughly as much of the plot as anyone needs to retain, and, honestly, as much as the film itself seems interested in. The setup is hokey, the tone lurches around without ever settling, and the whole thing has the feel of a project nobody quite believed in from the start.
What you cannot fault, and never can with him, is the man himself. Even here, in a picture he reportedly had little affection for, Chan delivers. The fight scenes are the one thing genuinely worth showing up for: inventive, precise, carrying that unmistakable sense that the person performing them has thought harder about the geography of a room than the director has. For a few stretches they almost paper over the cracks. Almost. The trouble is that the film keeps cutting away from the one thing it does well, leaning on wire-work and cheap digital trickery instead of the practical, bone-crunching stunt-craft that made him a legend. It's a bit like going to see a great chef and being served something reheated.
And the rest is a genuine mess. The supporting cast range from forgettable to actively irritating. Lee Evans, whom I have never been able to abide, gurns through the comic-sidekick role and grates from his very first scene. Every moment he's on screen is a moment stolen from something better, and there are a lot of those moments. It's the kind of performance that makes you appreciate how well Chan's best films balanced the comedy with the action, trusting him to provide both rather than bolting on a human foghorn.
Set beside the Chan films I've rated far higher, the Hong Kong greats like Wheels on Meals, or even put alongside Shanghai Knights, which came out the same year and left me similarly cold, The Medallion feels like a talent this singular being badly misused. Those Hong Kong films understood something that the Western productions keep fumbling: that the spectacle only lands when you believe in the danger, and you only believe in the danger when the camera lets you see what the body is actually doing. Wire-work and CGI shortcuts don't just look cheaper, they feel cheaper, and that cheapness drains the tension out of every sequence it touches.
There's a version of this film, with the same lead and a sharper script that got out of his way, that could have been good fun. This isn't that version. It's a wrong turn in the Chan library, and it knows it, and you can feel that uncertainty in every scene that isn't a fight. Two stars, and saved from worse only because even off-form, Jackie Chan throws a better punch than almost anyone alive.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2003 | Watched: 2026-09-07
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