Movie Review: The Medallion
The Medallion is the story of a mysterious child who was born in the fourth month of the Year of the Snake. This child has the ability to join two halves of an ancient medallion that allows him to grant dead people immortality and supernatural powers. Jackie Chan plays a Hong Kong police officer who must protect the child from an Englishman known as Snakehead (Julian Sands), who plans to use the child for his own evil purposes. Jackie is joined by two Interpol officers named Watson (Lee Evans) and Nicole (Claire Forlani) in a story that starts out in Hong Kong and soon finds itself in the land of the beer and the cell phone, Dublin, Ireland.
As much as I enjoy the charisma, the smile and the stunts of Jackie Chan, there was not much Jackie could do to save this movie. It is slow-moving, poorly edited, has special effects that have a real amateurish feeling to them and has more loose ends than Monika Lewinsky. In one scene, the wife of one of the Interpol officers is under attack. The wife is a librarian yet she has weapons hidden in her house and knows martial arts. We are never told how she got these talents. This is one of the loose ends that I can remember from the movie. There were probably other loose ends but much like the movie itself, they were forgettable.
The Medallion is not the worst movie I have seen this summer. There are a few Jackie stunts that are fun, Lee Evans (from There’s Something About Mary fame) has a couple of funny scenes (although only about 50% of the humor he uses in the movie is actually funny) and Claire Forlani is hot. I like Jackie’s own form of almost non-violent violence, if that makes any sense at all. He does not use weapons to kill people, he just seems to use a humorous form of violence to put them temporarily out of commission. Oh, and in what seems to become a Jackie Chan trademark, the outtakes at the end of the movie are okay. But overall, not even the likeable Jackie Chan can make The Medallion an even remotely likeable movie. (4 out of 10)
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