Armour of God

Armour of God is the closest Jackie Chan has been to dying. Within the first five minutes of the movie a relatively straightforward stunt goes horribly wrong, with Chan cracking open the back of his skull and requiring him to have major surgery, lose some hearing out of one of his ears and have a plug permanently inserted into his skull. Normally this would be enough of a major accident to completely stop a film’s production or require the lead actor to be replaced. Instead Jackie Chan went back to work, and took over directing duties as well. And it's a good thing too, since this fun romp is one of the more entertaining Chan movies.

Chan plays Jackie, the Asian Hawk, a treasure hunter/adventurer. He travels around the world, stealing artefacts and auctioning them off for big bucks. He is contacted by his friend Andy who desperately needs his help. Andy’s girlfriend (and Jackie’s former crush) Lorelei has been kidnapped by an evil cult seeking pieces of the legendary treasure, the Armour of God, a armour set said to bestow the owner with great power. They want Jackie to bring them the missing pieces of the treasure in exchange for Lorelei. Jackie and Andy receive backing by a rich Count who owns a few pieces of the Armour of God. He lends them his pieces on two conditions; that Jackie will bring him the full set, and that his daughter, May, goes with them. The trio head off to Eastern Europe to find the cult.

From there we get the usual collection of classic Chan awesomeness. There are fights, there are stunts, there are chases, there is wacky humour and slapstick nonsense, and it’s all a lot of fun. Armour of God also has the benefit of being filmed across Eastern Europe, with scenes in Croatia, Morocco, Austria and Yugoslavia. The settings give the movie its own unique feel against many other similar movies, including those in Chan’s filmography. The action is a lot of fun, and the stunts are pretty good as well. The climax of the film has Jackie leap from a Cliffside and land on a hot air balloon – while that was a bit of editing magic, the reality had Jackie skydive out of a plane to perform the stunt, which is just as freaky and dangerous. The stunt that went wrong was a simple one seen early on – Jackie jumps on a tree. It goes wrong (as shown in the credits) when a branch breaks and Jackie falls to the ground. After that scene, for the rest of the movie Chan has long hair to hide the surgery scars.

This is a pretty weird movie all things considered. There’s some awesome goofiness, such as Jackie’s custom Mitsubishi splitting off into a smaller getaway car. The opening scene is silly old school Asian racism, with tribal Africans depicted as gibberish spouting savages with spears, wooden masks and grass skirts. The evil cultists are a weird mob, made up of swarthy European dudes in monk’s robes, either brandishing machine guns or doing karate. Absolutely nothing about them makes sense, and everything about them is a bizarre series of ridiculous escalation. They live in a cavernous monastery, give out pamphlets in nearby towns, shoot-up concert halls to kidnap women, worship a giant snake statue and regularly hire prostitutes from the nearby town.

On the DVD special features, there’s an interview with Jackie Chan where he talks about the finale. He talks about how most action movies he was used to doing had a standard 1 vs 1 fight between the hero and the villain, and that he was getting tired of that so he wanted to do something different. Thus the finale has Jackie duke it out with four black women with Amazonian physiques. It’s an absolutely bizarre battle in the cavernous depths of the cult’s hideout, and the women simply don’t mesh well visually or conceptually with anything else that’s been going on in. But that’s largely true of the whole movie, it’s a lot of fun and a good time, but it’s so weird as well. This is one of the good ones, which is something I feel I say a lot about Chan movies.