Rob-B-Hood (Screen Daily Review)

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Rob-B-Hood

Lee Marshall in Venice 12 September 2006

Dir: Benny Chan. HK-Chi. 2006. 135mins.

Jackie Chan returns to the broad Hong Kong comedy action of earlier films like Meals On Wheels with the enjoyably ramshackle, fast-paced babysitting-crook yarn Rob-B-Hood. Laced with some classic stunts – a couple of them as inventive as anything Chan has ever done – and action set-pieces, and canny in its casting of youth-appeal talent like Louis Koo and Cherrie In, the film has a broader, more family-based audience target than previous Benny Chan-Jackie Chan collaborations such as Who Am I? and New Police Story.

Chan started becoming a global franchise with the low- budget, high-revenue Rumble In The Bronx in 1995, and hit paydirt with the two Rush Hour films in which he paired up with comedian Chris Tucker. But the stunt hero’s core market is still in Asia, from India across to Japan, and it’s in Hong Kong and mainland China that Chan has been doing his most interesting recent work, like his drunken, depressive police officer from New Police Story, or the self-centred chancer on the wrong side of the law that he plays here.

Fans there should respond strongly to this latest romp – which opens in mainland China on Sept 29 after its Venice premiere screening as part of the Midnight section - though as always many will consume the film on DVD rather than in theatres. With its relatively lo-fi effects, the $17m Rob-B-Hood is not a calculated Western crossover vehicle like Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, but it should play at the wider end of Chan’s ‘purist’ market in Europe and the Americas, appealing to those HK action buffs who refuse to have anything to do with the Chan of Shanghai Knights or Around the World In 80 Days. Sales so far include Minerva for Italy, Splendid for Germany and ShowEast for South Korea.

The baby bottle and the gun which appear in the film’s neat logo – reproduced on credits, posters and marketing materials – works as well as any tagline to signal the film’s comic premise. There are shades of Vin Diesel in The Pacifier in the tough-guy-looks-after-baby mix, though here there’s a lot more verve and a lot less schmaltz: you’d never be able to get away with some of these flying- baby stunts in Hollywood.

Thongs (Chan) and his partner Octopus (Koo) steal from the rich in order to finance their own high-maintenance lifestyles: Thongs wastes all of his booty on illegal gambling, while serial womaniser Octopus has a string of glamorous girlfriends to service. Their jobs are set up by The Landlord (Michael Hui), the timorous, bespectacled CEO and safe-cracker of this partnership in crime.

Thongs is in debt to a sadistic local loan-shark, The Landlord has his safe cleaned out, and when they are offered a huge sum of money for a career-crowning break-in, they leap at the chance. Thongs and Octopus are less enthusiastic, though, when they discover that the heist involves kidnapping a baby.

Crashing their getaway minivan at the end of a car chase, Thongs and Octopus are forced to take the baby home and look after it. Cue some obvious but reasonably amusing comic business, in which the two (who are taken for a gay couple) go to baby-care classes, learn how to change nappies, and keep baby entertained. A bond of course develops – and when they are forced to finish the transaction and deliver baby to the wealthy recluse who commissioned the kidnapping, the crime duo are forced to choose between money and ethics.

Chan is a little more portly and less agile these days, and he runs away from the baddies more than he used to, but the effect of this is to humanise his stunts and make them somehow more believable. There are still plenty of tasty action set-pieces to keep the fans happy: one of the most entertaining – not least because of its imaginative use of a typical high-rise Hong Kong exterior – involves Chan leaping from one air-conditioning unit to the next all the way down the outside of an apartment block.

There’s good buddy chemistry between Koo and Chan, and although some sloppily-shot bridging scenes betray the hectic schedules of Hong Kong cinema, the key action sequences look just fine.

Production companies/backers
JCE Movies Limited
Huayi Brothers Film Investment Co Ltd
China Film Co-Production Corp

International sales
Emperor Motion Pictures

Executive producers
Jackie Chan
Albert Yeung
Wong Zhongjun

Producers
Benny Chan
Willie Chan
Solon So
Wang Zhonglei

Screenplay
Jackie Chan
Benny Chan
Alan Yuen

Cinematography
Anthony Pun

Production design
Choo Sung-pong

Editor
Yau Chi-wai

Music
Chan Fai-young

Main cast
Jackie Chan
Louis Koo
Michael Hui
Gao Yuanyuan