Hidden Strike

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on August 10, 2023.

(M) ★★

Director: Scott Waugh.

Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cena, Pilou Asbaek, Ma Chunrui, Amadeus Serafini, Tim Man. 

"Wait - who's leading this dance?"

For a film that went through half a dozen name changes and sat on the shelf for half a decade, Hidden Strike is nowhere near as bad as you would expect.

Yes, it's largely rubbish, and it's only saved from being absolute rubbish by the sheer force of will of Jackie Chan and John Cena, but I have seen far worse films that didn't sit in the can for five years before finding a distributor.

The irrelevantly titled film centres on Dragon Luo (Chan) and Chris Van Horne (Cena), two ex-military men on opposing sides of a tense hostage situation. Dragon and his security team are tasked with rescuing a group of Chinese nationals trapped in an oil refinery, while Chris gets sucked into "one last mission" by his brother, who is part of a gang hired to kidnap some of the Chinese nationals.

But when Chris realises his brother is working for the bad guys, he teams reluctantly with Dragon to get the hostages back.

Aside from the truly horrendous CGI in places, the biggest problem with Hidden Strike is that Chan and Cena are too funny and wacky to be convincing as ex-special forces no-nonsense military types. This is either a casting problem (you got the wrong actors), a screenwriting problem (you haven't tailored the script to the big-name actors that have signed on), or a directorial problem (you've told your stars to be loveable goofballs half the time, and hard-arse soldiers of fortune the other half of the time). But let's face it - people are watching this because Chan and Cena are in it, and when they're being a goofy buddy-film duo, the film is enjoyable. So the script or direction should have changed to make this sit  better.

Because without Chan and Cena, this is unwatchable. The story is a so-so mess about an oil heist, with the trailer hinting at a not-too-distant future that isn't evident in the film at all. There's a partial desire to belatedly cash-in on the success of Mad Max: Fury Road - and some of those parts are cool - but largely it's a shiftless mess of '80s action clichés, bad direction, terrible CGI and a weirdly oversaturated colour palette. 

Cena and Chan vibe well, and Chan still has 80 per cent of his moves (despite being 64 years old at the time of shooting). As someone who has watched a shitload of Jackie Chan films over the years, I'm very aware that you watch his movies for the stunts, not the story, and if one of his films just so happened to have a strong script it was a bonus. With all that in mind, this is C-grade Chan - nowhere near the best stuff in terms of stunts and scripts, but also not the worst.

There's been an effort made here to make things memorable. Parts of the plot, some characters, a handful of action sequences and that horrendous soft-focus blueish-orangeness that tints everything actually stick out in the memory (for better or worse), but none of those elements are enough to make this good, let alone great.

In summary: hopefully Netflix didn't pay too much for Hidden Strike, but there are bound to be far worse films on the service.